The Wakefield Case

Part One

By Huck Akin

There has been a lot in the news lately about vaccines and the unvaccinated.  When addressing the question of why anyone would not vaccinate their children, inevitably the Voldemort of the anti-vaccine movement, Dr, Andrew Wakefield, is brought into the discussion.  He-who-must-not-be-named is, in fact, named a lot, and has been for some time.  On Facebook, I have regularly gotten postings like the following—this one many months before the Disneyland measles outbreak:

                                               _____________

It Took Studying 25,782,500 Kids To Begin To Undo The Damage Caused By 1 Doctor

Once upon a time, a scientist named Dr. Andrew Wakefield published in the medical journal The Lancet that he had discovered a link between autism and vaccines. After years of controversy and making parents mistrust vaccines, along with collecting $674,000 from lawyers who would benefit from suing vaccine makers, it was discovered he had made the whole thing up. The Lancet publicly apologized and reported that further investigation led to the discovery that he had fabricated everything.

In the intervening years, millions have been spent on studying this further to see if there was anything that could connect autism and vaccines. This is what they found. . . .

…and it goes on to explain that everything good ever said about vaccines is true and everything bad is false.

___________________

The only problem with this little piece of Black Public Relations is that it is composed entirely of falsehoods.  As it happened, I already knew something about this.

A few years ago while living in Oregon, an intense liberal guy I knew gave me some information on this case, telling me about this horrible doctor in England who was proved to have concocted a fraudulent study that suggested there was a link between vaccines and autism, and as a result thousands of children would die because their gullible parents believed him.  He added, that he thought that if there had to be a death penalty, that no one deserved it more than this Dr. Wakefield.

More recently, another friend on Facebook, also a peace-loving progressive, stated he’d like to shove a fireplace poker up Dr. Wakefield’s rectum.  How are such visceral emotions promulgated?

Now, I happen to have a character flaw:  when asked to join a lynch-party—even by the nicest people—I always feel I must, I must first check out the other side of the story.  You know, just to make sure we’re going after the right guy.

Here’s what I found out:  A highly-respected doctor and researcher, an expert in Crohn’s disease at the prestigious Royal Free Hospital in England, had put together a team of twelve of the most eminent specialists in their fields to look into an odd seeming-connection between “regressive autism”—that is, autism that strikes down a child that had, up to that point, developed normally—and persistent childhood bowel-disease.  As a G.I. specialist, he had been approached by desperate parents who, when they had brought to other doctors their children, who were doubled over in pain and were banging their heads against the wall, were told that these behaviors were just symptoms of their autism and they could do nothing for them.

The parents were each asked to write a history of their child’s development, and, as it happened, eight of the twelve had similar stories: they had brought a totally-healthy, non-autistic, child in for their scheduled MMR vaccine, the child suffered a bad reaction to the shot, and then never came back—became totally autistic. For those children, the mean time between vaccination and onset of autistic symptoms was 6 ½ days—though they may have had other, more immediate reactions to the shot, including fever, convulsions, etc.  (As it turned out, one of the mothers who did not mention the vaccine in her history, and thus not counted among the eight, also believed that MMR was the cause, and had so reported to previous medical persons, as the records prove—but had received such a hostile reaction each time, that her husband convinced her that if they were to get any treatment for their son, she must not ever raise that point again.)

The type of study that was done, as was clearly stated in the paper, is called a case series study which is not intended to prove anything, but only call attention to a possible syndrome—suggest possible hypotheses— so that researchers around the world can put together their own rigorous experiments to see if the connection is real.  By treating the G.I. disease in these children, they found that the symptoms of autism were reduced significantly—for example, the children who had not been able to get a night’s sleep, could sleep, and children who had lost the ability to talk began talking again.

The primary purpose of the effort was clinical care for the patients—care they had not been getting elsewhere—with the study taking second place.  That meant that invasive tests, such as MRI’s, that might have been useful in a rigorous scientific experiment, if they were not deemed to be helpful to the patient, were not done.  Ironically, later on, when the stool-sample hit the fan, this treatment/research dichotomy was used against Wakefield both ways:  where clinical-care took precedence, the study was faulted for being not scientific enough, and when clinical results were used in research, it was called “unethical.”  

The study did not attempt to find a connection between regressive autism and the MMR vaccine—it merely reported the histories as provided by the parents, because such histories are invaluable to medical researchers—and suggested that a possible connection with MMR be among the hypotheses to be tested.  This was not an unreasonable suggestion, as previous researchers had found links between autism and the measles virus, and MMR is a live-virus vaccine.

The resulting peer-reviewed paper was published in the Lancet, and, as it happened, Media attention focused not so much on the connection between autism and bowel disease, but between autism and the MMR vaccine.

At that point, he UK’s Pharm-Media-Government complex furiously mobilized and came down on the team like a ton of bricks.  The Drug Industry freaked-out at the idea that all that proposed research might uncover the link (that, as it turned out they had good reason to know about) and their only solution was to nip it in the bud by discrediting Wakefield.  By claiming he was guilty of scientific fraud, they could poison the well for any would-be researchers venturing along this path.

According to a high-level whistleblower inside the UK’s Dept. of Health, the DoH at the time was run by a hardcore group of “very rabidly right-wing” officials who had been installed by the previous Conservative government, and given poison-pill contracts to make it too expensive for the succeeding administration to fire them. “…the whole environment in public health at that time was bordering on the fascist.” He said.  This group seemed to be totally in the pocket of the British Drug Industry, and were shockingly unconcerned about harm to British children. 

The whistleblower, Dr. Alistair Thores, had recently returned from Canada where he had witnessed a disaster caused by the Smith Kline Beechum (Later to become Glaxo Smith Kline) MMR vaccine, with the Urabe-strain of mumps, which left a trail of meningitis-victims in its wake.  Now SKB simply relabeled that same dirty stock of vaccine under a new name and was pushing to sell it in the UK.  Dr. Thores tried to warn his colleagues in the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI), but was out-maneuvered by the Industry shills, and so for the next four years, until it was pulled for causing meningitis, the Urabe MMR vaccine worked its damage among British children.  By this time, it had also been withdrawn in Australia and Japan for the same reason. 

At that point, SKB finally had to bite the bullet, and dispose of their remaining stocks at a reduced price to third-world countries where parents don’t love their children as much. 

The Lancet, the journal that first published and later retracted the Royal Free study is owned by Elsevier, a house that publishes 500 other medical and scientific journals and has many corporate-level entanglements with the Drug Industry.  During the Vioxx class action hearings it came out that Elservier also published six fake journals—wholly funded by Merck without disclosure—that were strongly favorable to Merck in content.  (Merck itself circulated an internal memo on Vioxx, saying that dissenting doctors should be “sought out and destroyed where they live.”)

The editor of the Lancet who had approved the Royal Free paper, Richard Horton, wrote a book after the events, Second Opinion, describing the painful ordeal he went through following its publication.  He was telephoned by furious officials, accosted at dinner parties, assaulted with “highly personal” attacks, and so on.  At first, as he describes, he tried to defend the paper, explaining that it had pointed to a new syndrome that carried the promise of great benefit, that the MMR stuff was just a side-issue that didn’t affect the premise of the paper, and so on.  But, finally, as the pressure wore him down, he must have sensed he was on the wrong side of a lynch mob, and so he began to make public statements condemning Wakefield.  

Horton wrote another book on the affair, Science and Fiction, in which he describes a dinner-party consultation with a medical regulator, who, he said “seemed keen to pursue Wakefield, especially given ministerial interest.”  The trouble was, the regulator had no idea of what line of attack they could use, and he “…passed me his card suggesting that I contact him directly if anything else came to mind.”  And so Horton advised the regulators on a strategy for bringing down Wakefield, and became a lead witness against him at the resulting hearing, moving from the position of Black Sheep to Good Son in his bosses’ eyes.

At this point, a great deal of pressure was being brought to bear on the 13 scientist in the study to get them to sign-on to a technically-true-but-meaningless public statement that their study had not proved any causal connection between MMR and autism.  It was meaningless because a case-series study is not designed to prove anything, and that connection was not even the focus of the study.  Wakefield and two others refused to sign the meaningless statement, saying they feared it would be misconstrued.  Wakefield’s supervisor was replaced and Wakefield lost his position at the hospital.  But the other ten signed, and immediately it was ballyhooed everywhere that ten of his co-authors had “recanted” the paper.  That is not true.  All thirteen researchers still stand by every word that is in their jointly-produced paper today.

As a result of these shenanigans, most people unfamiliar with the details of the case assume that what happened was that a fraudulent doctor concocted a fake study and inveigled 12 of his colleagues to sign-on as co-authors, and when his fraud was revealed, they recanted their support.

 In fact, Wakefield did none of the clinical work himself, and all 13 went over the paper before publication and approved of all of it, so if there was any fraud they all had to have been involved.

At this time, a character named Brian Deer inserted himself into the story.  He is not a doctor or a scientist, but from his actions appears to be some kind of agent for the vaccine-makers—though, of course, I cannot prove that.  Deer went around to various participants, making false claims about Wakefield, and harvesting the surprise and dismay.  For example, he told Horton of The Lancet that the Royal Free study had been financed by lawyers—to the tune of £55,000 [One of Deer’s favorite tricks seems to be the making-up of precise numbers out of whole cloth]—and Horton expressed outraged that Wakefield had hidden this fact from him.  When Wakefield later met with Horton, and carefully laid out the true facts that not one penny came from lawyers—the Royal Free had financed the whole thing—Horton suggested that, well, maybe there was, “the possibility of a perceived conflict of interest.” 

Every attack on Wakefield that I have seen is based exclusively on Deer’s claims.  No one I know who has disparaged Wakefield to me, has ever actually read Deer’s reports, as I have (Let alone, Wakefield’s response)—They have only seen the resultant Industry-spin of those claims.  Not only is Deer neither a scientist nor a doctor, from what I can tell, he isn’t much of a journalist, either.  (Oh, wait, he has won awards!  Gosh, I wonder how that happened?)

A normal journalist, on hearing of a controversy, goes in and interviews the contenders on all sides, seeks-out recognized experts to quote on matters beyond the grasp of the general public, and always, always, allows those who are attacked to respond to the allegations.

In the case of the Royal Free study, none of the parents of the patients had complained of any unethical treatment, and none of Wakefield’s colleagues had disparaged his role in the study.  It was all Brian Deer all the way.  In his articles he jumps back and forth between the Lancet paper and the Piltdown Hoax (to the point where a casual reader might conclude that it was Wakefield himself who patched together the phony skull) and charges that Wakefield did one thing for a certain sum of money and another thing for another sum—accompanied by zero substantiation.  And never, anywhere, does he give Wakefield’s defense. With no substantiation and no response, Brian Deer’s hit-pieces on Wakefield, are the journalistic equivalent of a public-restroom graffiti-exposé that, “Sally Smith is a Slut.”

In one case, Deer noted that in the GP’s record, a mother had reported her son had problems related to hearing some weeks before the MMR vaccine.  Non-scientist Deer declared (his opinion) that deafness is a precursor symptom of autism, important information that Wakefield had deliberately left out of his study, he said, cherry-picking the data to improve his claim.  And that is fraud!

When Wakefield finally got to see those GP records during the GMC hearings, he found that the child’s problem involved a discharge from one ear—in other words, the kid had an ear infection!  This key bit of information Deer excised out of his presentation of the evidence.  In other words, it was he who committed fraud.  Those of us who have raised kids know that if ear-infections are prodromal to autism, we’re all in trouble! 

[I notice that on Deer’s website, he now has reinserted the words “…accompanied by discharge…” that he had left out of his original accusation, which read “At 9 ½ months, 10 weeks before his jab, his mother became worried that he did not hear properly: the classic first symptom presented by sufferers of autism.”  Re-inserting “discharge” back into the record, of course, makes this particular accusation ridiculous.  Also notice, typically, he doesn’t quote any authority that hearing-loss is a prodromal symptom of autism, as one would see in a normal news story—he, the reporter—just asserts it.]   

And yet, it is exactly this nonsense that forms the substance of Deer’s charge that Wakefield lied and committed scientific fraud, and why Anderson Cooper, (in a video linked at the end) could shout at Wakefield, “If you lied, then your book’s a lie!”

Anderson Cooper emphasizes in this interview and elsewhere that there were a mere 12 patients enrolled in the study—the implication being that this is far too few to be of statistical significance.  Nowhere in the MSM will you hear it explained that the Royal Free study was a case series study

Here is the textbook definition of a case series study (from Hennekens and Buring.):

Case series studies describe the experience of a single patient or group of patients with a similar diagnosis.  These types of study, in which typically an astute clinician identifies an unusual feature of a disease or a patient’s history, may lead to formulation of a new hypothesis…  At that time an analytic study (most frequently using a case-control approach), can [then] be done to investigate possible causal factors.

If you don’t like the hypothesis suggested by a case series study, the proper form of rebuttal is to do the full analytic studies called for by the case series study, hopefully proving it wrong! 

Hennekens and Buring further make clear that the purpose of a case series study is to generate new hypotheses about potential causation, not to investigate causality.

There is no required-number of subjects for a case series because each situation is different, and even a single case could require too-high a degree of coincidence to be easily dismissed.  How many times would you need to drop a Mento into a Diet Coke and see an explosive reaction before you could reasonably surmise there might be a causal connection between the two events that further research might prove?  Twelve times?  Six times?  Two times? One time? 

The most casual of case series studies can have tremendous medical impact.  In Australia in 1961, a Dr. McBride noticed that two babies were born in his hospital with missing limbs, and noted that both mothers had taken a new drug, thalidomide.  He published his case series observations in The Lancet, and this resulted, after further analytic studies (and PR battles with the drug companies involved), in the harmful drug finally being pulled.

To do as the Drug Industry has done in this instance, and muster all of your power to attack the case series study itself is a bizarre sort of response, whose motive can only be fear of what full analytic studies might discover.

University College, London, was called upon to look into the charges brought by Brian Deer--so far, it is the only academic institution to have done so.  UCL concluded that Deer’s allegations were totally without substance. 

In a normal case, that would have ended the matter.  But there were powerful political forces that would not let it drop, and so, the UK’s General Medical Council was chosen to carry on the fight against the Royal Free Study.  The GMC oversees doctors in the UK, and has the power to censure them and pull their licenses.  The GMC teamed-up with reporter Brian Deer, and proceeded to hold hearings on the Lancet article’s three senior authors, Dr. Wakefield, Dr. Walker-Smith, and Dr. Simon Murch.

Let me be clear here, the allegations against these men were not made by the patients or their families, not by any of their co-workers at the Royal Free, not by any academic institution—they were made only by non-Scientist, non-doctor, Brian Deer.  Deer also wrote a series of attacks on Wakefield that were published in The Sunday Times.  Later, similar attacks by Deer were, shamefully, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), and have since been scattered far-and-wide through Pharmaceutical Industry’s influence with the Media

For anybody who doubts this version of events, there is a wealth of documentation available on the GMC hearings, including not only that which was available at the time, but much that has been dug up since.  A lot of new material, including documents, correspondence and witness-interviews has come to light due to the diligent efforts of David L Lewis, PHD, who was assigned that task by the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) in Washington DC.  They have an ongoing “Research Misconduct Project,” which investigates “cases of ‘institutional research misconduct’ in which government, industry, and academic institutions use false allegations of research misconduct against scientists whose research threatens government policies and industry practices.”  In 2011, Dr. Lewis was assigned to investigate the Wakefield case, and he filed a report completely exonerating Dr. Wakefield.

The GMC attacks on the Royal Free study focused almost exclusively on ethical issues—whether they had filled-out the proper forms for ethical waivers, whether they had disclosed conflicts-of-interest, and so on.  Wakefield and the Royal Free group maintained that they filed all appropriate documents, and these were produced at the hearing. Deer had claimed they hadn’t.  (As Dr. Lewis later discovered, Deer had copies of many key documents, but withheld them from the GMC.)  The GMC preferred to believe Deer, and simply ignore any exculpatory evidence.  Wakefield said that the approvals they had, covered them for the whole study; the GMC claimed the study could be thought of as a collection of parts, and said they should have gotten approvals for each part. 

Here is an example of how a straight-forward event was twisted: seven of the children had been admitted to the Royal Free Hospital for care before the study began, and the usual clinical biopsies were done on them—which certainly needed no ethical approval.  Later, those seven were enrolled in the study, and ethical approval for research biopsies were sought and granted at that time.  Deer and the GMC spun this to claim that research biopsies were done on seven of the patients before ethical approval had been granted!

The GMC seemed to act as if every procedure must be either for care or for research, black and white, but never both; while, in the real world, there are many procedures and tests that are done for therapeutic reasons, that also can provide important information for research.

 Here is the accusation that has had the most impact in the Media’s spin on Wakefield:  The GMC, had hoped to go after him for more than just weak, fuzzy ethical charges.  They wanted to charge him with outright scientific fraud.  They nibbled around the edges a bit, by claiming that the patients in the study were not “consecutively-referred”—meaning that the patient-pool’s level of randomness was not at the level that was represented.  But then they called on an expert they’d hired to assist the prosecution, Dr. Ian Booth, to see if he could come up with any plausible evidence that Wakefield’s team had cooked the books in proving their central claim: that there was a link between regressive autism and colitis.  There seemed to be discrepancies in the Royal Free’s pathologists’ grading sheets.  Could he look into it? 

The process of turning the image seen on a microscope-slide into hard numbers is not totally cut-and-dried.  It’s kind of like umpires calling strikes and balls.  In a scientific study, what you want are the best pathologists around—which the Royal Free study had—and consistency.  Just as you want the same umpire behind the plate for both teams, you want the same pathologist, or team of pathologists, examining all of the slides—both from the subjects and the controls.  (And, of course, the study was blinded so the pathologists didn’t know which is which.)  But most of the patients, when first admitted, had their biopsies examined by whichever random pathologist of whatever specialty happened to be on duty for that shift; and then later, for the study, by team of experts in the required field.  These results didn’t always agree, and this discrepancy is what Brian Deer later used to claim that Wakefield had “altered” the data.

But Brian Deer, remember, is not any kind of doctor, while the GMC’s Ian Booth is a pediatric gastroenterologist.  Booth told the GMC that the grading sheets were not evidence of scientific fraud, and so the GMC never made that charge.

But later, after the hearings, someone “lifted the rejected evidence out of the wastebasket” and passed it on to Brian Deer, who then made it a central thesis in his attack-pieces on Wakefield.

If the GMC had tried to make that charge, the Royal Free team could have cross-examined the accuser, and shown by a myriad of examples in the literature how there was nothing sinister in the discrepancy.  And, at least, gotten all that into the record.  But there is no answering the MSM if they won’t even allow you to speak a full sentence.  (Witness Wakefield’s “interview” with Anderson Cooper.)

 This totally vacuous charge by Brian Deer, luridly developed in his many articles, is the key basis for the claim that Wakefield “altered data” and “committed scientific fraud.”  No academic investigation, no legal process, has ever substantiated such a claim.

This is important enough that I want to put it into clear terms with a simple analogy:  Let us suppose that you are a researcher doing a study of pesticide-residues in potatoes.  You collect your samples at various supermarkets, labeling each potato as to type, source, etc., and as part of the identification process, you weigh each in the nearest produce scale, and write that down.  Later, in the laboratory, you use a proper scientific balance to weigh your samples.  A chemical company that doesn’t like the results of your study, later goes through your notes and finds there is a “discrepancy” between the weights recorded on the (inaccurate) produce-scales, and those from your finely-tuned laboratory balance, and exploits this mismatch to declare that you have “altered data” and committed “scientific fraud.”

The embarrassing fact that the GMC never charged the Royal Free team with altering data, but that accusation was only made in Deer’s articles, was spun by the editors at BMJ as their little Clever-Boots Brian had come up with information that had just never occurred to the GMC .  Here are their words:

“”[I]t has taken the diligent skepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud…  The GMC launched its own proceedings that focused on whether the research was ethical… [Deer’s] focus was now on whether the research was true.”  

The GMC wound up censuring Wakefield and Walker-Smith and stripping them of their licenses to practice medicine in the UK.  Wakefield moved to the US, but Walker Smith, who had also been a very highly-respected doctor--he was considered “the father of pediatric gastroenterology”—challenged the GMC’s rulings, taking the case to the UK’s High Court.  (His professional insurance paid for the challenge—Wakefield’s insurance would not—but it was considered that a reversal on the facts for one would exonerate all.)

Walker-Smith challenged each and every one of the GMC’s findings, and the High Court upheld his challenge on all counts, reversing the GMC and restoring Walker Smith’s medical license.  The High Court’s Justice John Mitting blasted the GMC, saying it made “fundamental errors,” and “distorted evidence” inappropriately rejected evidence, and called the findings “not legitimate,”   “perverse,” “odd,” “wrong,” and “untenable.”  In effect, the High Court, using the strongest legal language, called the GMC hearing a Kangaroo Court.

Justice Mitting ruled that the Lancet children were, in fact, consecutively referred, and that the contested procedures were, in fact, clinically indicated, and did not require additional ethics approval.

This reversal on the facts for Walker-Smith should be taken as a reversal for Wakefield, as well—ethical waivers are for projects, not individuals.  But Justice Mitting, despite his findings against the GMC—perhaps fearing he’d be attacked as an anti-vaxxer-symp—concluded his ruling with a gratuitous disclaimer that, “There is now no respectable body of opinion which supports [Dr. Wakefield’s] hypothesis that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked.”

He also stretched himself to cut Wakefield out of the exonerated herd, by giving his opinion that “Dr. Wakefield’s purpose was undoubtedly research.”  In other words, the exact same procedure that was clinically-justified for Walker-Smith, could still be chalked-up against Wakefield because Wakefield’s motive, the justice assumes, was research.  Does this make sense to you?  In any case, it is this most gossamer of flimsy threads linking Wakefield to some kind of technical violation in the ethical approval paperwork that is the only formal charge remaining against him.  And yet, it is upon this diaphanous foundation that the Drug Industry and their Media minions have emplaced their whole battery of propaganda against Wakefield.

So, if some dubious ethical technicality is all they can sustain against Wakefield, why are we even talking about it?  It has as much relevance to the momentous scientific questions at hand as whether or not Wakefield adjusted his rear-view mirror before driving out of the hospital parking-lot.

After looking into both sides and all aspects of the controversy, there is only one conclusion that I, or any reasonable person, could come to:  Dr. Wakefield and his Royal Free team did solid science that spotlights a breakthrough-connection between persistent bowl-disease and autism, and Brian Deer is some kind of Drug Industry stooge who has nothing useful to add to the conversation.

I find Deer’s allegations to be disingenuous, nitpicky and false.  For example, autism, being still a little-understood disease, the names and definitions of various aspects of the disorder-spectrum are continually shifting in the literature, so Deer exploits this word-game to assert that many of the patients never had autism at all!  In fact, Wakefield made no diagnoses of autism—these were all made by the team’s child psychiatrist, and clearly, by the behaviors described, all the children are severely disabled by what you or I would call “autism.”

I have little doubt that if Wakefield’s team had simply edited-out of the parents’ histories all references to MMR (or, as Wakefield has suggested, if the histories had linked the children’s regressions to natural chickenpox), then the Lancet paper would have been hailed far and wide as a momentous breakthrough.  But because Wakefield was honest and forthright and did not waver in the face of enormous Drug Industry pressure, he has seen his reputation and career destroyed.  In the UK, Wakefield is presented as a Guy Fawkes of medicine, and biology students must learn his name, accompanied by false characterizations of the case, so that they may learn the lesson that those who question vaccine-safety are frauds.

I see repeated throughout the US Media, as a statement of fact—not an allegation—that Andrew Wakefield committed scientific fraud in order to claim vaccines cause autism.  Only those who are totally ignorant of the actual circumstances can honestly entertain that claim.  The Royal Free’s Lancet Paper addressed the Vaccine/Autism question in only two ways: (a) it cited the parents’ histories, and (b) it suggested that the possible connection should be looked into.

Can you commit scientific fraud with a suggestion?  If not, then you must let go of (b).  And the only way Wakefield could have committed fraud with the parents’ histories, is if he had somehow altered him—which nobody, least of all the parents, is claiming.  So that eliminates (a).

The other Media-charge against Wakefield is that he altered data to support the paper’s actual contention: that regressive ASD might be linked to chronic bowel disease.  Since Wakefield did none of the clinical work himself, and only coordinated the work of others, the only way he could have done this would have been to alter the data that was handed-in to him.  But all of his co-authors read and approved the paper before publication, and none of them has ever suggested he did such a thing; so if there had been any fraud, it would have had to have been a weird conspiracy of all thirteen of them together.  But not even the pro-Drug Industry propagandists are claiming that.  They are simply relying on the public’s ignorance of the true circumstances to make their claims.

There is zero evidence that Wakefield did anything wrong, and I am happy to discuss this question with anyone who thinks they know otherwise.  In fact, the Lancet paper was a breakthrough paper that is beginning to lead the way to the first glimmerings of a real understanding of this new modern plague. 

Wakefield’s contribution has been intelligent, insightful, and compassionate, and he has shown admirable courage in the face of the most extreme, vile and unwarranted attacks on his character by the Drug Industry and its government and Media shills.  We have too few heroes in this world who are willing to stand up against that kind of pressure, and when one does come along, they should be cherished and supported; we should not allow ourselves to be herded into an ignorant army, casting stones at our fellows on behalf of our Corporate Masters.

Part Two

The Autism Question

Tens of thousands of parents have reported a nearly-identical tragic story:  They take their bright, happy, healthy, socially-responsive child to the doctor for their regularly-scheduled vaccinations, the child has a bad reaction to the shot, and regresses into full autism.

But according to the vaccine-makers, through the Media, these unhappy parents are suffering from a delusion.  They know, because they have done “study after study after study” that proves there is no link.  Actress Amanda Peet, and many others, like to talk about “fourteen studies.”  I heard vaccine-creator Paul Offitt say the same thing, just the other day.

At this point, I’d like you to pause for a moment and think for yourself, if you were to design such a study, how would it work?

Got it?  I guess you might have come up with something like this: “Collect the medical records of two groups of children in a certain age-range, one group is fully up to schedule in their vaccines, and the children in the other group have never been vaccinated.  See how the two groups compare in rates of autism.”

Sounds pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it?

But, it may puzzle you to learn, despite the “study after study after study,” No study has ever been done that compares autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated, or that looks at the health of unvaccinated children for any purpose!

(This despite the fact that way back in 1982, the not-yet-completely-Reaganized CDC called for just exactly such a study, and in the years since, members of congress have demanded that such a study be done.)

In The Royal Free study, researchers did not seek referrals from doctors for patients who might have gotten regressive autism from a vaccination—vaccinations weren’t mentioned at all.  They sought referrals for patients who had both regressive autism and symptoms of persistent bowel disease.  It just so happened, that parents of 9 of the 12 had, in personal accounts, linked the disease to an MMR vaccine.  And this may very well be a representative sample of parents’ experiences. 

Media personalities such as Stephen Colbert poke fun at gullible parents of an autistic child, like actress Jenny McCarthy, for being too stupid to understand that their personal experience is just “anecdotal evidence” that has no scientific value.

 “Anecdotal evidence” is something that happens to a friend of a friend.  Each of these tragedies is, in fact, a documented clinical event.  The only thing that is “anecdotal” about them is that no one in the drug-industry-medical--government-complex wants to examine these incidents—or even accurately compile them—only wave their hands and shout, “It wasn’t the vaccine!  It wasn’t the vaccine!”

There are two simple yes-no questions about autism which should be really easy to answer scientifically: (1) Has the rate of autism really increased, or is the apparent increase just some kind of artifact of diagnostics?  And (2) Do vaccines cause autism?

To answer the second question first, as we have noted, we just need to compare a population of vaccinated children to a population of unvaccinated children—there are certainly tens of thousands of those available—so many, in fact, that the California Legislature felt it necessary to pass a law that takes away parents’ former right of opting out.

During the Disneyland measles flurry, I listened to a number of discussions on the radio, and there was one doctor who repeated the whole “Study after study…” business, and then he took it a little further, describing how such studies are done: comparing a group of unvaccinated  to a group of vaccinated and finding there is no difference.  I’m sure he wasn’t being deceptive—I doubt if he, himself had ever read any of the studies—but he had heard this repeated so many times and simply made the natural assumption about the cited studies that most everyone makes.

If I were to ask you “What is the rate of autism among the unvaccinated?” you will not be able to find that answer anywhere.  At least, no one has ever taken that measurement directly.  Some spokesperson might claim they can “infer” the answer through indirect studies which claim there is no difference—but I can assure you that no unvaccinated subjects were included in those studies. 

The loud references to “study after study,” or “fourteen studies,” or “seventy two studies” or whatever have an odd ring to them, in that there is much emphasis on the number of studies, with little discussion of the contents of any particularly definitive study.

It makes me think of a dialogue among teen-age boys:

“Hey Paulie, you ever done it wid a girl?”

“Oh, sure, lotsa times.”

“Oh yeah?  Who, Paulie, who you done it wid?”

“Oh, bunches uv ‘em.  So many I can’t remember ‘em all.”

Oh yeah?  Name one, Paulie!  Name one!”

Nobody I have contended this with has actually read a single one of those oft-mentioned 14 studies—not one.  I have waded through many of them in detail and read the abstracts of all, along with the criticism and counter-criticism of all, and I will tell you now, there is no there there.  Anyone who imagines they will find a nice clean, simple study comparing autism rates among vaccinated as compared to the unvaccinated, will be sorely disappointed.  What you will find instead is a lot of pirouetting around the edges, the juggling of unfounded conclusions based on obscure and inappropriate data—a reach and a half.  

If the reader is a person in the medical profession, who is thinking right about now that I must be full of organic tofu and patchouli petals—I challenge you to find one study—just one—that you would be proud to put your name on, that you believe really makes the case for no vaccine-autism link.  In fact, I think you will be appalled at just how vacuous these studies are, and how flimsy the bases for their conclusions.  (In some cases, the authors of the studies do not agree with the far-fetched conclusions that the vaccine-pushers have appended to them.) 

Here is a good link to the most-often cited studies, in full as published, along with some useful commentary: 

http://www.fourteenstudies.org/studies.html

Here are some examples of what you will find:

After Wakefield et al let the cat out of the bag, Michael Rutter, a primary witness against Wakefield, and a spokesman for Glaxo Smith Kline, recruited a couple of Japanese MDs and they slapped together the “Japanese Study.” (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Hideo Honda, Michael Rutter)

What they did was this: GSK’s brand of MMR had been spreading meningitis wherever it was introduced, until each country finally banned it.  When it was withdrawn in Japan, instead of a single trivalent vaccine, the doctors were given three monovalent vaccines—M+M+R—which were normally injected in a single visit instead.  Although it solved the meningitis problem, there is no reason to believe M+M+R would have lessened the assault on young children’s immune systems.

During the period of the study, as their own numbers show, the total burden of vaccine-uptake per child in Japan went up.  Also, the total rate of ASD also went up.  Rutter et al cynically spun these facts to declare that after MMR was withdrawn, autism went up—proving the vaccine couldn’t be the cause!

Or maybe you would prefer “The Danish Study:” This one, put together by our own CDC, looked at what happened when Thimerasol (Mercury) was removed from Danish vaccines—and, guess what, Autism actually went up a little!  The authors mentioned in passing that just before the mercury came out, the database they used had changed:  it now included all the out-patient clinics where 5 times as many autistic patients were registered as were in the previous database which only counted those in the hospitals, and that this might have artificially-raised the autism-rate in the outcome!

Ya think?

In other words, much-older, previously-uncounted, patients who could very well have been injured by Thimerasol, suddenly flooded into the study and were treated, statistically, as if they were recently-born; and no adjustment was made for that, other than the authors’ off-hand disclaimer.

 Or you could see the Canadian study where the author took the rate of MMR uptake data from one city (Quebec City) and compared it to autism rates in a different city (Montreal).   (Pediatrics, Eric Fombonne, MD; July 2006)

Or, perhaps you’d like to stake your reputation on what has been called “the most widely quoted study, and the only study ever done with American data on American children.”  (Pediatrics, Thomas Verstraeten, MD; November 2003)

  Here is a quote on it from an article on it in the Huffington Post:

"CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding has delivered a potentially explosive report to the powerful House Appropriations Committee, in which she admits to a startling string of errors in the design and methods used in the CDC's landmark 2003 study that found no link between mercury in vaccines and autism, ADHD, speech delay or tics."

As Dr. Mark Geier later reported:

…this very study was the topic of secret closed meetings between members of the CDC and other government organizations, as well as members of the vaccine manufacturers held at Simpsonwood, Georgia from 7-8 June 2000. The transcript of this meeting has been obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This transcript reveals that the study initially found statistically significant dose-response effects between increasing doses of mercury from thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines and various types of neurodevelopmental disorders. The transcript documents that the data was real and statistically significant for many types of neurodevelopmental disorders, but that the meeting participants expressed that the data had to be "handled." Despite discussion about how to "handle" the data, some participants expressed concern that the work that had already been done would be obtained by others through the Freedom of Information Act. 

There is only one plausible reason why the Drug Industry and their government minions refuse so strenuously to do the neat and simple study that the situation really demands: they already know the answer, from previous evidence they’ve buried.  They are fully aware that it is their vaccines that are causing this tragic devastation, and such a study would reveal all their lies and leave them standing naked and bankrupt before the world.

As to the first question:

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has gone from one in 10,000 to—what is it up to today, one in 60?  And nobody—other than the affected parents—seems particularly curious about what is causing the explosion.  The idea that this is some kind of reporting-change is ludicrous Drug Industry BS.  Many doctors in practice today never heard autism mentioned in medical school.  And yet, the families of the victims find their lives turned totally upside-down.  It’s not as if nobody just ever happened to notice it before. 

Classic autism is described as existing at birth.  Regressive autism is a recent phenomenon.  The first place to look, to understand the cause, is to listen to the parents, and follow up with solid studies.  But that’s what Wakefield’s team tried to do—and look what happened to them.

Here is a long-practicing pediatrician Kenneth Stoller, MD, addressing this issue:

Let me take you back to the year 1989, when the first child with ‘autism’ that I had ever laid eyes on was brought into my office by his mother.  I did not know it was autism at first as I had not been taught anything about autism in medical school and had never encountered a child with autism through my residency at UCLA.  I studied this four-year-old boy carefully.  I could see intelligence behind his eyes but an increasingly high level of frustration was building as it was clear he was trying to communicate verbally and nothing intelligent would come from his lips, just like an old-time phone switchboard where all the wrong wires were plugged into all the wrong connections.  The frustration overwhelmed him, and he lost his composure.

            I remember going through the textbooks later that day thinking I had just seen 1 in 10,000.  I had been a board-certified pediatrician for more than two decades, and I can tell you these kids were not there at the beginning of the last quarter of the twentieth century.  I saw a lot of rare and unusual disorders, but I had never seen a case of autism before that day.

Yet, HHS, the CDC, and NIMH would have us all believe that pediatricians who practiced in the seventies and eighties were not astute enough to diagnose autism, that these children and adults were among us all the time, and that we just ‘missed’ all these little people who would suddenly stop talking, become incontinent, scream all day, walk on their toes, and throw themselves on the floor in supermarkets and parking lots when they weren’t just trying to run off without direction or purpose.

            Any illness that goes from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 50 in the course of a couple of decades should be of interest to members of the media but, sadly, they’re content to merely repeat the tired claims of health officials and leave every aspect of autism as one big mystery.

            Why aren’t members of the media looking for all those autistic adults that we called something else before we became enlightened?

On PBS’s NOVA show a while back, they did a pro-Drug-Industry puff-piece that was nothing less than an hour-long commercial for vaccines.  The show featured one of the Industry’s spokespersons, the mother of the cutest, happiest, most loving teenage autistic girl.  In the mother’s beautiful, spacious office, her daughter nuzzles up to her and coos, “I uv oo,” so endearingly, that, I think, many a parent of a snarly teenager must have felt pangs of envy watching it.  The soothing-voiced female narrator explains that, originally, the mother had attributed her daughter’s condition to a vaccine injury, until the science was explained to her.  The mother had mistakenly thought this, the narrator explains, “because she had first noticed the symptoms of autism around the time of a vaccination.”

I intend this paper be based on evidence and reason, and had not planned to include any photos of vaccine victims, because they might provoke an emotional response that could affect judgment—but I will make an exception this once, because looking at the evidence yourself is the best way to counter such slimy, disingenuous propaganda.  Below are before-and-after photos of Zeda Pingel, one of thousands of “Gardasil Girls,” whose mother has allowed her photos to be seen online.  Looking at them, you can see why her mother might not have “noticed the symptoms” before in her straight-A, cheerleader daughter.  And as far as her alleged injury being “around the time” of her first Gardasil shot—was it before or after?  Ah, why be so specific—I mean, who’s keeping track?

Below, Dr. Julian Whitaker, MD describes the case which began when 13-year-old Zeda was brought to the clinic for a routine wellness check, and was given a Gardasil shot recommended by her doctor.

The problems started a week later, and within three weeks, Amy reports, “I began to lose my precious daughter. Zeda stopped talking, stopped eating, stopped walking, and…lost control of her bladder.”

Doctors in Denial
Despite spending months in a top-notch children’s hospital specializing in neurological problems and undergoing hundreds of tests, Zeda’s doctors couldn’t find a single explanation for her rapid deterioration. Given that it started after Zeda was vaccinated, Amy thought it could be related to Gardasil, yet every time she brought it up, the medical team aggressively denied that it could have been involved.

Their denial borders on the diabolical. For weeks, the doctors and nurses accused Zeda of faking her symptoms, even though she was having frequent grand mal seizures. Even worse, they suspected her mother was coaching her to keep up the pretense and went so far as to install 24-hour surveillance cameras in hopes of “proving” that the mother and daughter were involved in a hoax.

Today, Zeda is fed through a gastric tube, breathes through a tracheotomy, and lives in a vegetative state in the living room of her mother’s home. Her tragedy is not an isolated incident. Tens of thousands of adverse reactions to the HPV vaccine have been documented—including over 100 deaths.

Gardasil Casualty Zeda Pingel, Indiana

Posted by: Erwin Alber in Adverse events, Gardasil September 30, 2014

By Norma Erickson

The idea of rushing such a poorly-tested and notoriously reactive vaccine into the market, and then pushing it on every young person from 9 to 26 at huge expense, when we can’t possibly know if it will even save a single life for 20 or 30 years is not a decision that would be made by any responsible agency for public health—only one that only cares for the financial health of the Drug Industry it serves.  Here is Dr. Whitaker again, laying out the case with clear logic:

The vaccine camp underscores the need for mass inoculation by trotting out government statistics showing that more than a quarter of American females ages 14–59 and nearly 45 percent of those ages 20–24 have been infected with HPV.

However, they fail to mention that there are 40 sexually transmitted HPV strains, and those targeted by Gardasil (types 6, 11, 16, and 18) and Cervarix (types 16 and 18) are rare. HPV types 6 and 11, which can cause genital warts, were detected in 1.3 and 0.1 percent of women, respectively, and types 16 and 18, which are linked with some cases of cervical cancer, were present in only 1.5 and 0.8 percent!

Bottom line: very, very few women who have HPV are infected with high-risk strains, and far fewer get cervical cancer. Every year in the United States, about 12,000 women are diagnosed with this cancer, and 4,000 die of it. Of course, any premature death is a tragedy, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that, according to the latest statistics from the National Cancer Institute, only 0.68 percent of women will ever be diagnosed with, let alone die of, cervical cancer.

Number Needed to Treat
To further underscore the absurdity of universal HPV vaccination, let’s look at the concept of “number needed to treat,” or NNT, an extremely useful statistic for evaluating any medical treatment. Simply stated, NNT tells us how many people need to be treated with a given therapy to get the desired benefit in one patient. The lower the NNT, the more effective and predictable the treatment.

For example, peptic ulcers are primarily caused by Helicobacter pylori bacteria, and antibiotics that eradicate it are an extremely effective therapy. For every 11 patients with H. pylori who are treated with antibiotics, 10 are cured of their peptic ulcer. Therefore, the NNT is 1.1 (11 divided by 10).

Another example is statin drugs, which are prescribed to millions of people to lower cholesterol. According to a recent study, in order for statin drugs to prevent one heart attack, stroke, or cardiovascular death (the desired outcome of cholesterol-lowering), they would have to be taken by 1,000 patients, making statins’ NNT 1,000 (1,000 divided by 1). The other 999 people per 1,000 who take these drugs and are subjected to their adverse effects get no benefit at all.

Unacceptable, Sky-High NNT
So what is the NNT of the HPV vaccine in terms of preventing cervical cancer deaths? Even if it completely wiped out cervical cancer—which no one expects it to do—thousands would have to be vaccinated in order to prevent one death. The others would obtain no benefits, yet would be needlessly exposed to the inherent risks of this vaccine.

…An NNT in the thousands is an unmitigated fraud, and there’s no evidence that the vaccine will save even one life!

We already have a system in place for preventing cervical cancer that works very well: regular Pap tests (every three years for women ages 21–65). Even the most vocal vaccine proponents admit the vaccine doesn’t eliminate the need for Pap testing—or that most cervical cancer deaths occur in women who haven’t been screened in the past five years. This system has reduced the incidence of cervical cancer from 15 in 100,000 women in 1975 to 6.6 per 100,000 in 2008. Why fix something that isn’t broken? The answer is obvious: Follow the money.

Astronomical Costs
In the United States, there are roughly 30 million females between the ages of 9 and 26 who are “eligible” for HPV vaccination, which requires three doses spread out over six months at a retail price of $130 each ($390 total). That’s nearly $12 billion right into the pockets of Big Pharma.

Now, let’s add in physicians’ fees and average the cost for the three-dose course at $500. (Some doctors will charge more, some less.) So $500 x 30 million patients = $15 billion. Imagine spending $15 billion on a vaccination program with no hard evidence that any lives will be saved!

Let’s take it a step further and assume this lavish blanket of presumed protection actually works and cervical cancer is eliminated. (Never mind that a miniscule percentage of HPV-infected women ever develop cervical cancer, that 30 percent of women with cervical cancer have not been infected with HPV, and that we won’t even know if the darned thing works for decades.) Guess how much it would cost per life saved in this best-case scenario? $7.5 million!

If we took that $15 billion and put it towards food subsidies and other proven health interventions, we could save tens of millions of lives. But, incredibly, the powers that be prefer to waste it on a fraudulent vaccination program that funnels the money into the coffers of Big Pharma!

Now They’re Going After Boys
As if 30 million girls and young women weren’t enough, Merck tried to get Gardasil approved for women up to age 45, but even the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognized this absurdity for what it was. However, Big Pharma also has males in their sights, arguing that they too must be vaccinated to prevent the spread of HPV to their sexual partners.

If vaccinating females makes no sense, going after males is a crime against humanity. HPV is almost always an inconsequential infection in males, so the NNT for them is infinity! No male gets any benefit at all. Unfortunately, they are not immune to the adverse effects of the vaccine. In fact, they are likely at greater risk of damage—at least that’s what we’ve learned from the standard childhood vaccinations, which negatively affect two to three times more boys than girls.

Part Three

Safety and Efficacy

“Science says, Science says!” The Vaccine Makers like to squawk—but for all the lameness of their sham science, they might as well be saying “Simon says!”

The Gardasil safety trial is a good illustration of this.  Imagine that Coca Cola had announced that Vanilla Coke does not cause cavities.  “Our scientific study showed that Vanilla Coke caused no more decay than the placebo!” they declare.  The placebo, it turns out in my fictional story, is Vanilla Coke with the vanilla left out.

In the Gardasil safety trial, the placebo was not a simple saline solution—it had all the same dangerous junk that was in the regular shot, including polysorbate 80 and aluminum—everything but the antigen itself!  The trial did produce an abnormally large number fatalities in total—but, since both sides balanced, it passed the test!

Such methodology might make sense in a test of efficacy—but to claim it covers safety as well, is flagrant humbuggery!

With publication of the Lancet paper, as Wakefield began to perceive the storm that was about to come down on his head, he did some research—reading every paper he could find on vaccine safety.  What he found—or perhaps, what he didn’t find—shocked him.  Time after time, vaccines had been rolled out with little but fig-leaves in the way of safety-studies.  Most of what he says in interviews about vaccine-safety comes from this reading, as well as a lot of research by others that has been done since.

You seldom hear accusations that the chemical-drugs produced by our modern Drug Industry contain unwanted contaminants—these drugs are often synthesized as single molecules, and it is not difficult to have them come out pure.  The named molecule itself might actually turn out to do more harm than good—but not because of any contaminant.  Indeed, the most common criticism is that those drugs that are synthesized from ancient botanical remedies, are too pure—they lack many other beneficial substances that were in the original herb.

But when it comes to the purity of vaccines—that is a whole ‘nother kettle of bouillabaisse.  Vaccines are more like biological soups, and each manufacturer’s product and each batch can vary widely.   

 You will find vaccines are commonly sent into service containing myriad stray infectious agents including monkey viruses, pig viruses, stray strands of RNA, and so on, not to mention preservatives and adjuvants (to enhance immune response) such as mercury (despite denials, it is still used), aluminum, msg and so on that are intentionally added, and which have been linked in studies to adverse reactions.  And this is all beside the infectious agent of the targeted disease which, if killed, may still contain harmful amounts of toxins, and, if live, can establish chronic infections in some individuals and even be transmitted “horizontally” to others who did not get the vaccine, as has happened with Polio and Measles.   

In a link at the end, you can hear clips from an audio interview with Maurice Hilleman, the most prolific developer of vaccines ever, discussing the problems he had dealing with monkey-viruses—he said they had found more than forty of them so far and they were very hard to detect, let alone get rid of.  He said that in conversations with Albert Sabin, he asked Sabin how he dealt with the monkey-viruses, was answered that there was nothing you could do. Sabin’s company had vaccine trials going on in Russia at the time, and Hilleman said that he and his colleagues were joking that in the upcoming Olympics, the US would beat Russia because their athletes would be loaded-down with tumors.

The Drug Industry has presented the vaccine controversy as a clash between real medical science and a bunch of unscientific anti-vaccine nuts who threaten to roll back modern progress in medicine.  This is a false-framing of the dispute.  According to Wakefield, neither he nor any of his co-authors are anti-vaccine.  They all believe that well-designed, properly-administered and properly-tested-and-monitored vaccines are an essential part of public health policy.  Their concern is a product-safety issue, and the covering-up of information that is resulting in unneeded tragedy.

So while this debate is really about corporate greed and state abuse of power—which should be a classic Progressive cause—our Left-Liberal gatekeepers have been stupidly gulled into spinning it as Science vs. Yokels.

When carmaker GM’s fatal flaws in their their ignition-switches finally came to light—after years of covering it up—you did not see their PR department claiming, “Those unscientific anti-car nuts are going to send us back to the horse-and-buggy!  People today forget how common it was for people to die by being thrown, kicked-in-the-head, or trampled by runaways!”

 I think the reason the Drug Industry can get away with this mischaracterization is because of the stark dilemma that has been forced upon parents.  We cannot simply go into a clinic and say that instead of a combined-vaccine shot, we’d like our child to have the single antigen of this, naming the brand, and if it goes well, in 3 months you’ll get the single antigen of that.  Nor is it even generally possible for our trusted family-doctor to lay out such a thoughtful program for us. 

When Dr. Jonas Salk developed his killed-virus Polio vaccine in the 1950’s, the rollout of mass-vaccinations was accompanied by a tremendous publicity campaign.  Many parents were hesitant to trust their precious children to a bunch of egg-headed scientists (not without good reason, it would seem.  Already in the 20^th Century, quite a few previous vaccination programs had gone horribly awry.)  These fears were dismissed as the products of ignorance and superstition.  The PR flacks and their doctor-stooges were given all the press they needed to assure everyone that the vaccines were perfectly safe; they couldn’t possibly harm anyone.  In the course of their reassurances, someone realized that they could make a better case if they could cite tests that had been done to prove the safety.  The problem was, no such tests had been done. 

 So, at the eleventh hour, an order was sent down to a lowly NIH bacteriologist named Bernice Eddy, M.D., Ph.D, to do some kind of test to prove the safety of the vaccine.  She recalls the order coming down to her on “Due Yesterday” basis.

When she injected her monkeys with the vaccine, they were soon falling down crippled in their cages.  Obviously, the “killed virus” was still alive.  She identified the tainted batch as coming from Cutter Laboratories, in Berkeley California, and sent back an urgent report to her bosses, accompanied by a photo of the paralyzed monkeys, to make sure she got their attention.

Now, the management at NIH had not been waiting for the results of Eddy’s test before the mass-vaccinations—to them, this was just a bit of perfunctory window-dressing, and the fact that it had backfired annoyed them no end.  There were great pressures, both financial and political, to go ahead with the mass-injections.  A number of prominent doctors were recruited to put the weight of their reputations behind the vaccine, and to counter the anti-vaccine nuts.

Among those celebrity-doctors was Dr. Alton Ochsner, Head of Surgery at Tulane Medical School, who also happened to be a major stockholder in Cutter Labs.  He performed a public demonstration of his faith in the vaccine by injecting his two grandchildren with it.  The mass-vaccination went ahead on schedule, and within days, many children became crippled or died.  Within 48 hours, Dr. Ochsner’s granddaughter had contracted polio, and his grandson had died.

In the aftermath of the debacle, Dr. Eddy was taken off polio research to punish her for embarrassing her bosses with her warning. 

Later, Dr. Eddy linked up with Dr. Sarah Stewart at the National Cancer Institute in some ground-breaking research.  Dr. Stewart, MD, PhD, had been pursuing the idea that some viruses could cause cancer—a possibility that was dismissed out of hand by the NIH and NCI staffs, who referred to Dr. Stewart as “an eccentric lady.”

In 1957 Stewart and Eddy discovered the polyoma virus which produced several kinds of cancer in a variety of small mammals.  Later, SV-40, a cancer-causing monkey virus, was identified with polyoma.

Bernice Eddy began to worry about the polio vaccine, which was grown on monkey kidneys.  Viruses are incredibly tiny, and when harvesting the polio virus, vaccine-makers could not help but include a myriad of monkey-viruses already in those kidneys.

In 1960, Eddy announced that she identified monkey viruses that had contaminated the polio vaccines.  Her NIH bosses were livid, and they went about crushing Eddy professionally.  Her discovery carried with it the implication that the US population would be due for an explosion of soft-tissue cancers, beginning 30 years after the first mass-inoculations—starting in 1985.  In fact, this has proved to be the case.

Eddy’s NIH bosses took away her lab, destroyed her animals, put her under a gag-order, prevented her from attending professional meetings, and delayed publication of her papers.  But other researchers, including Maurice Hillerman, later confirmed her findings.

The cancer rate by 1988 had jumped 20% over what it had been in 1973.  But what is more significant, is that the vast majority of cancers during that time span had kept a fairly flat rate, and that it was five particular cancers that jumped tremendously:  lung, breast, prostate, lymphoma, and melanoma of the skin.  Putting aside lung cancer, which is complicated by smoking habits, here are the increases:  Skin…70%, Lymphoma…60%, prostate…60%, and breast…34%.  There is today no accepted explanation for these increases.

I have seen claims by the Drug Industry that SV-40 could not have been responsible for the increased cancer rates, because, once the virus was eliminated in the vaccines—or so they claim—the rates have stayed high.  This is a very flimsy and scientifically-untenable conclusion to draw, however, since it requires that we trust their claims, and ignore the steady increase in various new vaccines, with myriad possible contaminates, that have been injected into our children since.  Their reasoning falls into the same category as the murder-suspect who, being arrested on solid evidence, claims that he couldn’t possibly be guilty, since, while he was in jail, another person was murdered somewhere.

 When Stewart and Eddy proved that viruses could cause cancer, one government entity that took her seriously was the CIA, who has always had an ear out for cutting-edge science that might be bent to their peculiar purposes. 

The CIA has a long history of assassinating people around the world whom it has deemed inimical to the interests of the CIA.  They hoped to create a fast-acting cancer-virus as an assassination-method that could be disguised an Act of God.   The afore-mentioned Alton Ochsner, who had previously worked with the Agency, assisted the CIA in this endeavor.  (Ochsner, who had trained between the wars in Germany, was a virulent anti-Communist who, some witnesses claim, was in communication with the CIA’s Nazi doctors that had been squirreled away in Paraguay.)  In this effort they were successful, first testing it on monkeys, and then on at least one death-row inmate from Angola Prison, who quickly died from the fast-acting cancer.

In any case, to get back to our main topic, it is clear that now—in all parts of the world that have been touched by civilization—humanity is infested with animal-viruses, with unknown effects on our health, which never would have entered our bodies without the mass-vaccination programs.

The trouble with vaccine-safety is that, since Reagan’s de-funding and deregulation, our public health agencies have been so co-opted and corrupted by the Drug Industry that proper safety studies and proper follow-ups are simply not being done.  For example, until a recent University of Pittsburgh blinded, controlled study on polyvalent vaccinations of infant Macaques, no one had ever tested vaccines in the actual combinations in which they are given to human babies!  This study found, in fact that clear damage was done to those receiving the vaccines, which did not occur in those receiving saline injections.  

The other, very important, safety concern is that there is no real monitoring of adverse effects.  Reliable estimates are that between 1 and 2% of actual adverse effects are officially reported. (The government’s number is 10%--but there is good reason to believe this is inflated.)  The common experience reported by parents, is they will bring their child back to the clinic with severe symptoms following a vaccine, and the doctor will have no idea what the child is suffering from—but when the parent says, “My baby was fine until that vaccination,” The doctor will get angry, and declare, “It has nothing to do with the vaccine!”

Now, clearly this oft-repeated reaction has nothing to do with science or reason—it is simple True-Believerism.  A doctor who doesn’t know what causes the disease cannot plausibly rule out vaccines.  If a mother had reported the child showed regressive mental impairment following a fall from a 2^nd story window, the doctor would have no trouble believing that the accident was likely the cause of the disability.  But our doctors are told through their training and literature that “Study after study after study after study has shown no link between vaccines and autism or other mental impairment.”  This is a total lie, but the doctors don’t know that.  They are told, instead, that the supposed link is an urban legend spread by empty-headed actresses through the Internet.

Public health agencies make decisions based on Cost-Benefit calculations.  If the science is real, then both the benefits and costs must be accurately-assessed.  In the case of vaccines, however, the supposed benefits are celebrated and ballyhooed, while the costs are kicked out the back door and ignored like an unwanted step-child. VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, is a passive system that depends for the bulk of its data on doctors volunteering that they have just injured a patient with an injection—those same doctors who have been trained to cry, “It wasn’t the vaccine!”  This is about as scientific as relying on NY Yankee fans to vote on who won a close tag at the plate. 

And yet, for safety, each patient’s reaction to a shot should really be closely monitored.  A child who reacts badly to a vaccine, should never be given a repeat-dose containing those antigens or additives.  Many of the regressive-autism accounts involve rechallenge with a vaccine that produced an adverse reaction the first time.

 A vaccine developer and widely-heard spokesman for the Industry, Paul Offit, has often repeated his own theoretical calculation that an infant could be given “100,000” [sometimes also quoted as “10,000”] antigens in one shot, without adverse effect.  Of course, no one is going to ever do that experiment, nor do I envision Paul Offit following in the footsteps of courageous medical pioneers and injecting himself with a Kickapoo-Joy-Juice made with every antigen he can find on the shelf, just to prove his point.  But let’s leave glassy-eyed True-Believerism behind, and look at one example of empirical evidence: when the MMR vaccine was augmented with just one added antigen—for Chickenpox (MMR-V)—convulsive reactions doubled, and the vaccine had to be recalled.

 The danger of such extreme opinions being put forward as if they were real knowledge is not that anyone will actually try something like Paul Offit’s nightmare scenario, it is when an informed mother objects to her baby being injected with a cocktail of nine antigens, she will be told, “Oh no, don’t worry, studies show that thousands of antigens wouldn’t hurt her.  Your baby is only getting nine!”  

At one time, it was well recognized that the contraindications against vaccination included the very young, the very old, pregnant mothers and anyone who was sick—even with a cold.  But with Drug Industry sales pressure, these cautions have been thrown out the window.  Newborns are now routinely vaccinated, often without even a bye-the-bye to the parents.  Why your infant should need the very dangerous Hepatitis B vaccine, that has an admitted half-life of effectiveness of seven years, is beyond me.  Unless, of course, your plans for your offspring include them becoming an IV-drug-using child-prostitute.

Informed parents today all recognize the benefits of breastfeeding, and understand they must delay the introduction of certain solid foods for fear of triggering allergies in their child’s undeveloped immune system.  Is it not reasonable to assume that the injection of substances designed to provoke a general immune response, might, in some instances, trigger autoimmune diseases?  In fact, if you Google “vaccines and auto-immune diseases,” you will find a bunch of peer-reviewed scientific papers exploring and confirming the links between various vaccines and a whole slew of autoimmune diseases—many on the increase in recent years—including variations of lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, M.S., Guillain Barré, as well as ones you never heard of, like APS and SLE.     

Here is the package insert for DPT vaccine (Diphtheria Toxoids and Pertussis Vaccine Tripedia®).  Normally, of course, the parents are never shown such warnings:

Adverse events reported during post-approval use of Tripedia vaccine include idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, SIDS, anaphylactic reaction, cellulitis, autism,convulsion/grand mal convulsion, encephalopathy, hypotonia, neuropathy, somnolence and apnea. Events were included in this list because of the seriousness or frequency of reporting.’

 The US Vaccine courts, as well as courts around the world have been quietly awarding multi-million dollar damages due to vaccine-caused deaths and disabilities, including from auto-immune diseases, and for autism.   A careful study in 2011 showed that at that time the US vaccine courts had awarded upwards of $2 billion for vaccine-caused autism—though to disguise this fact, the cases were usually described as “encephalopathy.”  That is, the child is now autistic, and this autism resulted from an encephalopathy that was caused by the vaccine.  

Note SIDS, listed above.  Sudden-Infant-Death Syndrome was only named in modern times, and has now been strongly-linked to infant vaccines.  Furthermore, there is good evidence that “Shaken-Baby-Syndrome” may really be, in some cases, vaccine-caused encephalopathy.

In fact, it is because of vaccine-linked SIDS, that our whole legal and health-system response to vaccine injuries has been changed.  A quick look at this story might be instructive:

For many decades, American vaccine makers had produced a type of pertussis vaccine, called whole-cell vaccine, that was notorious for its reactivity, sometimes causing permanent brain damage, even though much safer acellular versions were known and patented.  The whole-cell vaccine is cheaper to make, however, and it is one of the paradoxes of “free-market capitalism” that companies in competition cannot free themselves from a price-pressure maelstrom without regulatory assistance.  At that point, if the government had done its job, it could have banned or phased-out the whole-cell vaccine, putting all companies on an even competitive footing.  But they did not do that, so unnecessary damage was inflicted for another 40 years. 

Today, the harmfulness of whole-cell pertussis is well established, and, in fact, it is illegal to manufacture here for use in the USA—though it may be made to be sold in other countries, where, as I have noted, children are not valued as much.  In Japan, it was banned, and they developed a safer acellular version that worked as well or better.  In Sweden, it was determined that the harm caused by the whole-cell vaccine was greater than the harm caused by Pertussis itself, and it was banned in the 1970’s.  From 1970 till 1985 even when they went Pertussis-vaccine-free, there was not a single death from Pertussis in Sweden.

Then, in 1979, in Tennessee, four infants aged 2-3 months died of SIDS within 24 hours of receiving their DPT shots, all from the same “hot lot.”  As the news spread, the CDC, under its second-in-command, issued a recall. 

The head of the CDC, Dr. John Petricciani had been away at the time, but when he returned, he reversed the recall—putting the harmful goods back out for use—and wrote a letter of apology to the drug companies, assuring them such a recall would never happen again.

This incident caused the vaccine-makers to make a key change in their practices: from then till now they scatter each lot around the country so that any particularly-bad batches can be fully sold-out without causing such a geographical concentration of tragedies that it invites scrutiny.

This incident focused attention on the vaccine, and in 1982, a TV station in Washington DC ran a show called “DPT: Vaccine Roulette,” that was widely publicized.  (This was, of course, before the Drug Industry caught on to the strategy of buying wall-to-wall advertising on TV news programs.  You would never see such a show in the MSM today.)

At this point, the parents of DPT-damaged children began bringing lawsuits.  At first, attorneys had trouble finding professionals who would dare to challenge the Medical Establishment’s omerta.  Finally, a California pediatrician, Kevin Geraghty MD, came forward.  In an attempt to keep him out of court, Drug Industry goons harassed and intimidated him and his family.  But then, other professionals stepped forward, and soon the dam had broken, and there were many successful lawsuits.  A grass-roots movement began; one powerful group was called Dissatisfied Parents Together (DPT), organized by Barbara Lee Fisher in 1982.  Fisher and Dr. Harris Coulter published a book in 1985 called A Shot in the Dark, which educated parents about the real risks of various vaccines.

As a result of these developments, Congress enacted the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VCIP), administered by the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS).  This program, as written, was a reasonable compromise, which gave something to both the vaccine manufacturers and vaccine-victims.  It protected vaccine-makers from lawsuits in the courts, with the government paying claims; the funds presumably coming from a small tax on vaccines.  It was also intended to be no-fault and non-litigious:  The petition would be read by a neutral expert physician, who would recommend payment or denial, and this decision could be appealed to a special master.  A table was drawn up, and if the injury occurred within certain time-frame of the vaccination, the burden of proof fell to the Respondent to show there was some other cause.  If the injury fell out of that time-frame, the burden shifted to the Petitioner (injured party).  All decisions must be rendered within 6 months, or the Petitioner won by default.  The Petitioner’s experts and attorney would be paid for by the fund—win or lose, as long as the case was brought in good faith.

 In the beginning, the system seemed to work as Congress intended, but then HHS began to change the program administratively—without further input from Congress—so that today, while the program still protects the vaccine-makers from lawsuits, it has become a nightmare obstacle-course for the parents of injured children.  The neutral expert is no-longer neutral, but represents the Drug Industry, rejecting virtually all claims out of hand (all injuries are now said to be coincidental), making every claim litigious.  The time-frames in the table have been shrunk, and the time-limit for decisions has been lifted, so that some cases have dragged on for almost a decade.  The reimbursement for attorneys and experts has been reduced to the point where parents who are not wealthy can find it hard to get help.

Meanwhile, up into the 1990’s, the vaccine-makers continued their PR campaigns, insisting that their pertussis vaccines never caused brain damage or death.  They turned-out the usual bogus studies—“tobacco science” as it is now called, and many papers were published by prominent physicians (all in the pay of the Drug Industry).  In the JAMA in 1990, you could read “Pertussis Vaccine Encephalopathy: It Is Time to Recognize It as the Myth That It Is.” by Dr. James Cherry, professor at UCLA; or, in American Journal of the Diseases of Childhood, a similar article by Vincent Fulginiti, “A Pertussis Vaccine Myth Dies;” and similar stuff by other shills in The Journal of Pediatrics, and so on.  

Around this time, the British and Canadian courts ruled in two landmark cases that there was insufficient evidence to say that pertussis vaccine could cause permanent brain damage in children.  This meant that no one could bring a similar lawsuit anywhere in the Commonwealth.  In both these cases, the only experts called to testify were those on the Drug Industry payrolls.  It is interesting to note that a British government study back in 1983 had concluded just the opposite—but none of those scientists were allowed to testify.

The point I am getting at here is that in 1990, a Drug Industry apologist could claim with a straight face that those allegations of harm had been “thoroughly debunked” in both the journals and the courts. 

But a few years later this whole house-of-lies collapsed, as American manufacturers finally shifted to acellular versions, and no-longer felt the need to pump all the hot-air required to keep that particular myth aloft.

(As it turns out—the American-made Pertussis vaccines that are used today don’t actually prevent whooping cough—but I’ll get to that later.  That Goldilocks-zone can be really hard to find.)

 Anyway, to wrap up the discussion on SIDS, I remember back in the 1980’s when there were flurries of news reports on this mysterious new syndrome, and it was recommended that babies be put down to sleep with their head and arms placed a certain way, and it all seemed really odd.  I mean, my God, for thousands of years mothers have been putting their babies to bed on everything from straw mats to yak hides, and if there were some normal-seeming positions that could cause your precious infant to wake up dead, I think some old Wise Woman would have noticed it long before now and it would already be part of the lore, and we wouldn’t just be learning about it in 1983 in the San Francisco Chronicle!  But now I see this was all just misdirection away from the real cause of this new epidemic.

At the other end of the age spectrum, the 96-year-old matriarch of our family was recently in the hospital for an operation, and while I was there, it seemed like every day some medical person would approach with a clipboard, and ask, “Has she had her flu-shot yet?”  Not only does this reflect poorly on the hospital’s record-keeping system, but it reveals that some kind of campaign was underway—perhaps under threat of insurance pressure—to vaccinate all the old, sick patients there with the generally-useless flu vaccine.

Now, our mom has told me and my siblings on a number of occasions that the last time she had a flu shot, she almost died, and she never would get another one.  So, each time, that is what I told the medical person, who would scribble something on their clip-board.  Next day, we would be approached again by some other flu-shot pusher.

 But really, this is a brilliant sales-strategy by the Drug Industry.  Think about it: if our 96-year-old mom, in her weakened condition, had gotten the shot and died as a result, the flu-shot would never, never have been blamed by anyone!  Hey, she’s old; she just had the stress of an operation—that’s why she collapsed!

 And a similar case might be made for injecting newborns.  After all, any crippling impact the vaccine might have on your child will never be traced back to that injection—your infant has not yet established a track-record of normal health—so you will be told, and will probably believe, the fault is in your genes.

There was a time when I was a kid when you could ride your bike down the street on an afternoon and see whole families of kids out on their front lawns playing with Hula-Hoops.  It seemed like every family had bought one or two or three.  Wham-O made a fortune on those things.  But suppose they had somehow been able to get the government to mandate that every child must have at least 50 different Hula-Hoops—small ones, big ones, striped ones, polka-dotted ones—by the time they were seven years old.  Can you imagine how much money they would have made?  Can you imagine the political influence such a pile of money could buy?

Of course, there is no compelling story that you can tell about Hula-Hoops, the way you can about vaccines, which would justify bringing the government into the picture.  We all know the vaccine story, and it is a very simple one:  by injecting a killed or weakened disease-agent into your body ahead of time, your own immune system will create antibodies against that disease and protect you from getting it.  Unfortunately, like most simple ideas that purport to explain the human mechanism, it is only partly right.

We know that story is not complete because vaccines generally do not protect as well or as long as naturally-acquired immunity.  I had mumps as a child, and, as a result, I am protected for life.  Because I acquired the virus in the normal way, my total immune system was triggered—not just my antibody system, which is only one part of a total protective system.  The protection provided by the mumps vaccine—one of the M’s in MMR—is notoriously short-lived. 

Mumps is not a serious disease for young children—but it can be for adolescents and adults, causing sterility and other damage in males who were not fortunate enough to get the disease before puberty.  So it would seem that briefly protecting children from mumps during the time they are least-susceptible to harmful repercussions, and then, as it wears off, leaving them unprotected when it would be most dangerous for them, might be a poor public-health policy.  It would be nice to have health-officials who could make such decisions unencumbered by Drug Industry influence.

I mentioned before that the pertussis vaccines now used in the US don’t work.  You might have heard from your Doctor or someone that all those Tie-Died Hippies and Home-Schooling Fundamentalists who are not getting their children vaccinated are causing a new upsurge in Pertussis cases in California.  What your Doctor didn’t tell you—and probably doesn’t know—is that 92% of those new cases had, in fact, received at least one course of the vaccine—80% had had the full program.    

In the early 1900’s measles killed about 100 out of every million people each year.  With improved nutrition, sanitation, medical care, etc., the US rate steadily dropped from a 100 to a little over 2 per million by 1963—with no help from a vaccine.  For perspective, consider that in 1963, auto deaths stood at 220 per million.  (They are half that, today.) 

(Measles mortality is much higher in underdeveloped countries.  India accounts for half the world’s measles deaths.)

 This parallels the decline of most infectious diseases at that time, including some, such as scarlet fever, for which no vaccine was ever developed.  Then, in 1963, the measles vaccine was introduced.  The first vaccine was a killed-virus vaccine that turned out to be not only worthless, but dangerous, causing atypical measles cases that were far worse than normal, and it was replaced with a live-virus version 4 years later.  

When the creator of the vaccine was asked why in the world he bothered to make a vaccine for such a harmless disease, he answered, a la Edmond Hillary, “Because we can.”  Of course, once his company had the vaccine in hand, the formerly harmless disease was demonized in the literature and the Media, so that today, if you dared to suggest that the vaccine is unneeded, your doctor will lash out with vehemence to the contrary. 

Contrast the modern post-vaccine reaction to that of a Doctor writing in the BMJ in 1959:

In this practice measles is considered as a relatively mild and inevitable childhood ailment that is best encountered any time from 3 to 7 years of age. Over the past 10 years there have been few serious complications at any age, and all children have made complete recoveries. As a result of this reasoning no special attempts have been made at prevention even in young infants in whom the disease has not been found to be especially serious.

Although widespread vaccination suppressed the incidence for a time, there has now been a resurgence which is being blamed on all the anti-vaxxers.  Not in the least!  Most of those getting the disease today—such as all those infected Disneyland employees—had, in fact, been fully-vaccinated. 

Complications from measles, as is well-known, are worse among the poor and in impoverished countries.  That is because those complications arise from nutritional deficiency—especially vitamin A.  It was traditional in many advanced countries to protect children with cod-liver oil during measles outbreaks.

In fact, it might be more accurate to characterize bad cases of measles as a nutritional disease, like rickets, and the proper public-health approach should be to supply those nutrients to the children; not vaccinate.

Furthermore, in a number of measles outbreaks, it turns out not to be a wild strain at all, but the very live virus that has been put into the vaccine intentionally, and that has then become disattenuated, that causes the outbreak.

 (In Patrick Tierney’s book, Darkness in El Dorado, he reveals that in 1968, geneticist James Neel vaccinated Yanomami Indians in Venezuela with a measles vaccine—the notoriously-reactive Edmonston B—and a harsh measles-epidemic spread out from his points of vaccination.)

A study in New Zealand showed that in the pre-vaccine era, 99% of 15-year-olds had antibodies to measles—because they had been exposed as children.  But by 1985, after routine measles-vaccine programs, 14% of 15-year-olds lacked those antibodies—because the protection from the vaccine wears-off as years go by.  We can expect, by parenting age, the rate of protection will have fallen off a lot more.

It was once a tradition in our country to have “chickenpox parties,” and “measles parties.”  Mothers would bring their children to play with a child who had just contracted the disease.  This gave them some control of the situation—they could, for example, boost the child’s immunity with cod-liver oil ahead of time.

Even if the MMR vaccine that is given today did not have its notorious adverse effects, its use would still be counterproductive.  Vaccine-immunity is very shallow compared with lifelong natural immunity.

Also, when a mother has natural immunity, she protects her baby far longer:

Mothers transmit all sorts of protective immune globulins to their babies naturally via the placenta and these last for several months. She also passes general and specific immunity through her milk. A mother who has had natural measles yields protection to the baby against measles for about 12 to 15 months while breastfeeding. Mothers who were vaccinated transmit a shorter duration of protection to their babies. In the era of vaccination, babies are now susceptible to measles at a much earlier age (3 to 5 months).

That is why we have too-young-to-vaccinate infants getting measles now, and previously-vaccinated pregnant women are now contracting measles with resulting harm—including death—to their fetuses.

As an illustration of the incompleteness of immune-science today, consider this:  In the 1960’s scientists were astounded to discover that children with a condition called congenital agammaglobulinemia, whose bodies are incapable of making any antibody, can get measles, the disease runs its normal course, and they are afterward totally immune!

One of the most disconcerting discoveries in clinical medicine was the finding that children with congenital agamma-globulinaemia, who could make no antibody and had only insignificant traces of immunoglobulin in circulation, contracted measles in normal fashion, showed the usual sequence of symptoms and signs, and were subsequently immune. No measles antibody was detectable in their serum.

Chicken Pox has been hard case to make for the vaccine companies—because the disease is so harmless.  Of course, chicken pox can lead to shingles later in life—but the vaccine doesn’t prevent you from getting that.  In fact, when the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine was first introduced, some skeptics predicted that it would lead to increased shingles-cases for adults, and that prediction seems to have come true.  Shingles is a much more debilitating disease—so the trade-off may have been a bad one. But never fear—the same company, Merck, that brought out the varicella vaccine, has also come out with one for shingles, at $200 a pop!

The simplistic “vaccinate first, ask questions later,” approach is messing with a complex system that is little understood, resulting in unknown consequences.   One of those consequences may be that even children have now started getting shingles—something previously unheard of. 

Because childhood chicken pox is so benign, the best argument the vaccine-makers have been able to come up with is that you could lose three days of work staying home with your sick child!

If parents were fully-informed as to the risks they were taking with the vaccine, and allowed to make the choice, don’t you think many would prefer to accept the risk of the natural disease?  

I have little doubt that there are some vaccines, that have actually done more good than harm, and there is no reason why in an enlightened public-health system, carefully-selected, safety-checked and properly-administered vaccinations cannot play an important role.  But, unfortunately, we are far from that today.  Our vaccination policy is a runaway train, driven by Drug Industry profit alone, that crushes all attempts at prudent modification.

Last I heard, it is common for US children to receive 49 injections of 14 different antigens by the time they are six years old..  And they keep coming up with new ones.  (I understand they have 145 more vaccines in the pipeline.)

When a vaccine-maker claims that their drug is “85% effective,” we think it means that (on the average) if a hundred people are vaccinated, and are then exposed to the disease, 15 will get it and 85 won’t.  But that’s not what it means to the drug companies.  They mean that 85 will develop antibodies to the disease.  But many of those can still get sick—because, as I have pointed out, our antibody system is just one layer in our complete immune system.  The true effectiveness—that is, how many are protected if exposed—might only be, say, 20%--and that for only a limited time. 

Not long ago, a couple of whistle-blowing scientists at Merck revealed the company had been goosing its effectiveness-tests with animal antibodies.  They did this so they could claim their mumps vaccine had an effectiveness of 95%.  Now, please consider, any individual scientist who pulled something like that would be driven from the field.  All his previous results would come under suspicion, and likely be scrubbed from the record.  Has that happened to Merck?  Of course not.  They still fund their own research and their phony “tobacco science” is still cited far and wide by those who would discredit real scientists who are vaccine-safety advocates, such as Dr. Wakefield.

And this brings us to a key argument for mandatory vaccination: “Herd Immunity.”  Herd Immunity advocates say the government should impose forced-immunizations, so that the population can reach the 92-95% coverage that is required in their mathematical models for a particular communicable disease to be stopped from spreading altogether.

The immediate and obvious problem, of course, is that the vaccine companies’ own tests reveal their products’ so-called effectiveness does not reach 95%--let alone the actual effectiveness, which is always much lower (except, of course, for Merck’s Mumps vaccine, which was, as we have seen, due to scientific fraud).  So, the misguided Orwellian goal of forced-vaccinations resulting in “herd immunity” will be, for the foreseeable future, a distant, unreachable mirage.

The Swine-Flu Fiasco exposed just how little immunity our society actually has against dangerous schemes cooked-up by the vaccine-makers.  President Gerald Ford pretended to get the shot on TV (there is no evidence and no reason to believe he actually got the real thing), and he announced that it was his intention that every man, woman and child in the US would get one too.  Does that concept creep-you-out the way it does me?   Setting aside Hollywood movie-plots where the secret agent of a rogue nation infiltrates the vaccine-company and inserts a slow-acting virus that wipes our nation clean of people, just indulge in the following, quite plausible, thought experiment:  what if the 1950’s polio vaccine had contained, not SV-40, but HIV?  It would have been totally undetectable then, and the whole US Baby-Boom generation would have been erased from the planet!

(Let me observe here that governments tend not to respond well to low-probability events of devastating consequence.  Nuclear power is an example of this.  It has only been since Chernobyl and Fukushima that the real costs could be fairly calculated.  I will submit that mass-vaccination campaigns fall into this category, and should be frankly addressed as such.)

 As it turned out, fortunately, the Swine-Flu effort fell far short—but even so, official sources admit that dozens died and hundreds were left paralyzed with vaccine-caused Guillain Barré.  And not one person in the US ever got Swine-Flu.  If our Government had urged everyone to eat bat-excrement to protect our nation from an invasion of witches, it would have been just as helpful.

The other argument that is made against those who have the un-American, non-conformist gall to not vaccinate their children, is that they are getting a free ride, and putting those children who have been vaccinated at unfair risk.

If you want to watch someone trip over their own tongue, and deliver the most amazing gobbledygook, then respond to this accusation with the most simple and obvious defense: “But those children have been vaccinated!  They have nothing to fear from the disease!”

The answers to this question that I have heard from Drug Industry spokesmen, generally amounts to some opaque, turgid, roundabout way of saying “But the vaccinated children are not actually protected because our vaccines don’t really work.”

If I were the parent of a school-age child today, and I chose not to have some vaccination done on my child, my answer to official pressure would be, “The vaccine companies are engaging in a mass experiment—they may assert they already know everything, but clearly they don’t—records are supposedly kept, comparisons made, and conclusions are drawn, and every new batch of vaccine is a new experiment, since each batch will vary.  But to be truly scientific, an experiment must have controls.  For the good of the community, I am offering my child to be the control.”

This is, in fact, a valid point.  If we ever at long last compare the health histories of vaccinated children against those who are not—we will need some who are not. 

Unfortunately, this kind of data has been locked away by our government for some reason, as if it contained nuclear secrets—only made available to the Drug Industry for their cut-and-paste studies proving whatever they want it to prove, but denied to independent researchers.

Part Four

Our Perception of Vaccine History

We have all read of the histories depicting life centuries ago, and have been struck by the devastation wrought in families by childhood diseases.  A woman might give birth to nine children, and lose three or four of them to such scourges as whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and so on.  It seems reasonable to suppose then, if vaccines against these diseases were discontinued, that we would soon return again to that bleak age.

But, as it turns out, the great reduction in deaths from childhood diseases has almost nothing to do with vaccines.  (What it does have to do with, I’ll explain in a minute.)  Death rates are one of the more reliable statistics, and adverse reactions can be reasonably assumed to follow the death rates—the more deaths, the more adverse reactions, and vice-versa.  So we can get a true picture of the impact of vaccines from the following graphs: 

These graphs show the decline in mortality from a number of infectious diseases in the United States from the early 1900s.

United States mortality rate from measles, scarlet fever, typhoid,

whooping cough, and diphtheria from 1900-1965

Measles:  As I have mentioned, by the early 1960’s, mortality had fallen to between  2 and 3 deaths per million.  The Vaccine-pushers like to talk about “incidence”—but, in the case of measles, that is silly.  In 1955—when I was a child—the incidence was virtually 100%.  And, as a result, I and my fellow baby-boomers all have life-long immunity to measles, unlike, unfortunately, our grandchildren, who are only partially and temporarily protected by their shots.

Whooping Cough:  As I have shown in the long, sordid history of the the pertussis vaccine, it has been either harmful, or useless or both.  But by the time it had been introduced, the death-rate had fallen to about 1 in 100,000.      

Diphtheria:  The first efforts to introduce a vaccine for this disease were a disaster, as the vaccine itself caused the disease.  Finally, they fixed that problem, and the rates resumed their decline. 

Scarlet Fever:  There has never been a vaccine for scarlet fever, and, as you can see in the graph above, its mortality-rate has declined to insignificant right along with all the other diseases in the same time-frame.

German Measles: Or Rubella, is not listed above because the death-rate is nil; it is a very mild disease for children.  But if a pregnant woman did not catch rubella in childhood, and gets it in the first trimester of her pregnancy, it can cause birth defects.  One sensible solution might be to test every female reaching likely child-bearing age for antibodies to rubella, with only those who have not previously gotten the disease naturally, being vaccinated.  Of course, whether workable or not, any plan that sells fewer vaccines would never even be considered by our current industry-captured health agencies.

Why Death Rates Fell

During the Industrial Revolution, urban populations multiplied many times, and the poor, adults and children, worked long hours, often in dangerous and unhealthy conditions.  When not working, they were crammed into tenements where trash and vermin accumulated, sewage ran in the streets, and water and food were often contaminated.  Due to poor wages, malnutrition was the norm.  This created breeding grounds for diseases that were no respecters of class, and brought tragedy to families in all parts of town.  

Two important social movements in the later 19^th and early 20^th centuries changed the developed world from one of high child-mortality to the Baby Boomer world of the 1950’s, where all children could be comfortably expected to thrive.  The first was the Sanitary Revolution; the second was the Labor Movement.

The Labor Movement ended child labor, and enabled ordinary workers to raise families with proper nutrition and relatively decent housing.  The Sanitary Revolution reorganized and remodeled cities and smaller communities so that sewage and garbage-disposal was properly handled, and clean, potable water was delivered via sealed pipes.

Trials:   Vaccines are different from drugs in one essential way: Drugs are given to the sick, vaccines are given to the healthy.  To test a vaccine for efficacy, you can’t simply inject a few people, and then intentionally expose them to the pathogen and see if they get sick—ethics forbids this.  So, instead, you have to immunize many thousands, with the presumption that some will be exposed naturally, and then do a statistical comparison.  This kind of trial—with genuine volunteers giving informed consent, can be expensive if not impossible to do properly.

 As a result of these difficulties what actually happens is, the company does some kind of lab tests, some carefully curtailed animal tests, and some sort of hasty, fig-leaf trial, announces the product is safe and effective, has their handpicked minions in the health agencies rubber-stamp it, and then begins selling the vaccine, crossing their fingers that nothing will go too horribly wrong.  These are the phony “safety tests” that shocked Wakefield in his research.

Add to this the fact that every batch can vary, and that every individual immune system also varies, and we must realistically look at this as if every vaccine is always in trial, and carefully monitor, record data, and even allow some to go unvaccinated as controls.  (Which means we must let go of the misleading and dangerous pursuit of the “herd immunity” mirage.)

Anyone who declares that some vaccine is “perfectly safe” is simply flaunting their ignorance.  In fact, this is admitted by the very argument the Drug Industry made when angling for immunity against lawsuits, and the establishment of no-fault vaccine courts instead:  since sporadic-injuries will always accompany vaccinations, they should not be penalized while pursuing the greater-good. 

I brought up in passing the variation in our immune systems.  This is an important piece of the puzzle.  We could not have survived as a species if this were not true.  Otherwise, some disease would have come along ages ago with the master-key, and wiped us all out.  We have differences in our nuclear DNA, and differences in our mitochondrial DNA.  We must be very careful in labeling these differences as “flaws.”  Even sickle-cell anemia exists because the trait confers protection against malaria.

The Drug Industry has taken to looking for genetic “flaws” in anyone damaged by vaccines.  Vaccines enter the body through an unusual route that doesn’t often happen in nature.  If a child was killed by over-exposure to a pesticide, should we say, “Little Elmer died because he had a flaw in his DNA:  he wasn’t Roundup-Ready.”  (Eventually, I suppose, all the children with that flaw will die-out, and we won’t have that particular problem anymore.)

Here is a piece from CBS News reporting an award for vaccine-caused autism.  The victim’s father is a doctor, so I guess he knew how to navigate the system, and make the A-word stick:

CBS News has learned the family of Hannah Poling will receive more than $1.5 million dollars for her life care; lost earnings; and pain and suffering for the first year alone. 

In addition to the first year, the family will receive more than $500,000 per year to pay for Hannah's care. Those familiar with the case believe the compensation could easily amount to $20 million over the child's lifetime.

Hannah was described as normal, happy and precocious in her first 18 months. 

Then, in July 2000, she was vaccinated against nine diseases in one doctor's visit: measles, mumps, rubella, polio, varicella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and Haemophilus influenzae. 

Afterward, her health declined rapidly. She developed high fevers, stopped eating, didn't respond when spoken to, began showing signs of autism, and began having screaming fits. In 2002, Hannah's parents filed an autism claim in federal vaccine court. Five years later, the government settled the case before trial and had it sealed. It's taken more than two years for both sides to agree on how much Hannah will be compensated for her injuries.

In acknowledging Hannah's injuries, the government said vaccines aggravated an unknown mitochondrial disorder Hannah had which didn't "cause" her autism, but "resulted" in it. It's unknown how many other children have similar undiagnosed mitochondrial disorder. All other autism "test cases" have been defeated at trial. Approximately 4,800 are awaiting disposition in federal vaccine court.

Notice, that the Drug Industry (through a government spokespuppet) blames “a mitochondrial disorder.”  A previous study seemed to show that 1/5 of the autistics they tested had that same mito-condition as Hannah’s.  (Which means, 4/5 did not.)  But even if there is some kind of correlation, that doesn’t mean that one resulted directly from the other, or that that mito-condition would have ever caused her any problem without the multi-vaccine assault. 

Males are 4 or 5 times as likely to become autistic as females, so when a bright little boy is struck down with autism following a vaccination— do we say, “He had a predisposition to autism:  he is a male.  So he probably would have gotten it sooner or later anyway.”

Furthermore, they have been claiming that Hannah’s “disorder” occurs in one in 10,000.  But later research showed the true occurrence is closer to one in 200.  So now, are the vaccine companies going to start testing everyone’s mito-DNA before injections? (They haven’t yet.)

Below, is a link to an interview with the CDC chief before she went to her reward—that reward being a cushy post-retirement job with Merck Pharmaceuticals. 

Suggested Strategies for Families

I began writing this article about two years ago, and then had to set it aside while I responded to other calls on my time.  My original motive in writing the piece, was to communicate to friends and family the important information I had learned in my research, to expose the glaring, important product-safety issues that were being covered-up by the pharmaceutical companies and their minions in government health agencies, and help them form strategies to protect their children.

I have recently seen the documentary, “Vaxxed,” an excellent movie which I highly recommend.  The movie focuses attention on a CDC study that proved the vaccine-autism link, and how the CDC then changed the data and destroyed the evidence, committing massive scientific fraud.  

The CDC study looked at African American boys in Georgia, and proved that they were seven times more likely to be struck with ASD if they got their vaccines on schedule, rather than if they were delayed.  Although the study doesn’t compare vaccinated to unvaccinated, it did compare “on time” vaccination with delayed vaccination, and the stark difference raises the question, “If vaccines have nothing to do with autism, how could delaying the vaccines make any difference at all?”

Instead of publishing the real study, and using the new information to at least readjust the vaccine schedule—thus protecting thousands of children from destruction—they changed the data and destroyed the evidence, in order to protect Big Pharma’s biggest lie.  The lead scientist in the study defied orders, and saved the original records, which are made public in the film.

And this brings us to my first suggested strategy:

·      Delay, delay, delay.  The older the child is, the better able to sustain assaults on the immune system.  Never allow them to vaccinate a newborn.  Now they are trying to jump the gun, by vaccinating the pregnant mother-to-be.  Don’t let them do this—no real studies have been done to support this new practice, and you will be just an unpaid guinea pig.  Even with the new California law, they can’t force-vaccinate until your child enters kindergarten.  Avoid “well baby visits,” which are scheduled simply to push vaccines.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

·       If you choose to accept a particular vaccine, don’t let them combine it with a bunch of others.  Spread them out many weeks apart.  If you have followed the advice in the previous paragraph, you are in particular danger of having the medical staff “catch him up” with a whole arsenal of needles when you do bring your baby in.  My research shows this is how many cases of autism have been triggered.

·      If your child reacts badly to a particular vaccine, don’t let them have another in that series.  Accept that nature has given you a warning, your child is now sensitized, and back off.  Another tragic clue in many autism histories.

·      If your baby is sick—even with just a runny nose—don’t vaccinate.

I know personally a number of children who have never been vaccinated, and I would concur with the many, many statements I have read of parents who have stopped vaccinating their children, and who universally report that their unvaccinated children are healthier.  They never get the recurring earaches, sore throats, the asthma, the allergies, the autoimmune disorders, the ADD and ADHD—let alone the ASD—that their vaccinated children got.  When they do get sick, they recover more quickly.  The heedless attacks on immature immune systems that are inflicted on children today are permanently damaging those immune systems.  Never have children been vaccinated so much and so early, and never have children been sicker than they are today.

It is so strange that doctors and health officials get worked into lather over a harmless—in the developed world—disease like measles, while totally ignoring a horrible scourge like autism.  Autism at its worst can take your formerly bright and engaging child and convert them into a diaper-wearing perpetual two-year-old screaming with frequent pain.  And the rate of autism today is far, far higher than Polio at its peak. 

(Polio arrived in waves or peaks; the biggest outbreak was in 1916, and nobody knows why it came or went.  Another outbreak spiked in 1950, and had subsided by half before the Salk vaccine was introduced.  But autism just marches steadily on.) 

All our health agencies will say is, “We believe it is genetic.” (Based on zero evidence.) And they putter half-heartedly along.  But one thing they know—and they know absolutely: “It has nothing to do with vaccines!”  And that is why they never look there.

The Sandalwood Box

On my coffee table is a carved box made of sandalwood; it is normally empty except for a few coins.  Let us suppose, one day you come to visit me and you toss your keys onto the coffee table as we repair to the kitchen for a beer.  When you are about to leave, you look around, and don’t see your keys anywhere.   You check under the table and among the couch cushions, and, with rising anxiety, begin exploring further-afield.  You suddenly turn and say, “The box!  Could they somehow have gotten into there?”

I rest my hand upon the lid and answer you, “No!  Definitely not!  I just checked and they’re not there.”

So you continue looking everywhere else.  Now here is my question to you:  How long will you have to look before you find your keys, if, in fact, I have lied to you, and the sandalwood box is exactly where your keys are resting? 

Forever?

That is exactly where we are with our snowballing epidemic of autism.  The reason no one can ever find the cause is because the one place we are not allowed to look—in the vaccines—is exactly where it is!

Mark Huxley

Here are a variety of fascinating and informative links:

Below is a short, 8 ½ minute interview with Wakefield in which he gives specific recommendations to parents.

Next is a 24-minute interview in which he discusses his case.

http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=608256A446123276E4E72A5351322186

 Below is a long and detailed interview with Wakefield in which you can get a very good impression of Wakefield as a person, doctor and researcher, and, incidentally, learn a lot about the subject.  He also answers questions about his case.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/01/24/new-evidence-refutes-fraud-findings-in-dr-wakefield-case.aspx

And here, below, is Anderson Cooper delivering the MSM version of events that most people have seen while browbeating and interrupting Wakefield so that he cannot begin to answer the flood of falsehood pouring down on his head.  Once you become familiar with the foundational facts, you see how this is conscious disinformation.  Compare this type of so-called journalism with the other interviews linked on this page and tell me which informs you better about the man and his study.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=video%2c+anderson+cooper%2f+wakefield&FORM=VIRE1#view=detail&mid=45FB49CBB0820138016B45FB49CBB0820138016B

Presentation by Dr. Suzanne Humphries, an excellent, highly educated vaccine researcher:

Below is a lecture by Dr. Suzanne Humphries on the history of polio, showing that the sound-bite version of the popular mythology does not begin to capture the real story.

http://vactruth.com/2013/02/15/disappearance-of-polio/

And below, a brief history of smallpox:

http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2013/08/27/vaccination-a-mythical-history-by-roman-bystrianyk-and-suzanne-humphries-md/

At this site is a transcript of the Maurice Hilleman interview.

http://www.naturalnews.com/033584_Dr_Maurice_Hilleman_SV40.html

  I have had trouble finding the audio or video that is not freighted with sensationalized commentary—Hilleman’s words alone are sensational enough!  For example, when he supposedly takes credit for bringing AIDS into the country, I am sure he is joking—a bit of gallows humor—but some commentators take it at face value.  Nevertheless, in the following video, you can still see and hear Hilleman frankly discussing the problem of virus contamination.

Testimonials:

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/933954-autism-parents-reply-to-cnn-hear-this-well/?photo=2

Good article on Measles:

http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/05/straight-talk-on-measles-vaccine-in-canada.html

Good website on UK vaccine issues:

http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/

CDC Whistleblower says they covered up autism:

The Examiner reported that Thompson, who has been with the CDC for more than a decade, admitted to Hooker that he and several other authors behind the study manipulated and hid data that proved Black babies were more than three times more likely to develop regressive autism if they were given the vaccine before the age of 3.

For more than 10 years, parents of Black children may have been uninformed and unaware that giving their baby the vaccine could drastically increase the likelihood that they could develop autism. According to Age of Autism, “That one lie is responsible for at least 250,000 cases of autism in African-American male children and that number is a gross underestimate of the true extent of the damage.”

Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Thompson’s statements come after Congress already has started to suspect something was awry with the CDC’s investigation.

U.S. Congressman Bill Posey of Florida requested information from the CDC regarding the study in the past, but the agency refused to hand anything over.

Posey released a public statement saying, “The CDC can’t be trusted regarding investigating vaccine safety.”

From the Atlanta Black Star