What are your rights to refuse a vaccination for yourself or your children? Alan Phillips, J.D. of www.VaccineRights.com discusses with Michael Ostrolenk the 3 main types of exemptions available, medical, religious, and philosophical.
Category Archives: vaccines
Nurses win temporary injunction against influenza vaccine; Canadians suspend seasonal flu shots; firemen refuse H1N1 vaccine
Some states are passing laws to expand the powers of public health authorities to force people to submit to mass immunizations: for example, Pennsylvania House Bill 492 and Massachusetts (WorldNetDaily 10/12/09).
But public health campaigns to get everybody immunized against both seasonal influenza and swine flu (novel H1N1) are running into opposition. Continue reading
Swine flu: pandemic or panic?
Public health officials are gearing up for a mass swine flu (H1N1) immunization campaign, first targeting children, pregnant women, and medical workers.
The U.S. government has purchased 195 million doses of swine flu vaccine, and contracted for 120 million doses of adjuvants to stretch the vaccine supply. The production process in eggs is yielding two to four times less viral antigen from H1N1 flu than from seasonal strains. Continue reading
Judicial Watch reports on the Gardasil public health experiment
Based on records obtained under a May 2007 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Judicial Watch has summarized the approval process, side effects, safety concerns, and marketing practices related to the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil. It calls these a “large-scale public health experiment.”
One of the most startling findings is 78 cases of outbreaks of warts following the vaccine in women already infected without knowing it. Besides genital warts, some patients experienced massive outbreaks on the face, hands, or feet, sometimes caused by strains not included in the vaccine.
Additionally, the vaccine could increase the incidence of CIN 2/3 (cervical endothelial neoplasia in moderate stage) in women who had persistent infection with “vaccine-relevant” HPV strains at baseline. A chart in a report of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) showed an efficacy rate of –44.6% (that’s a minus sign) in subjects already exposed to “relevant HPV types.”
On June 25, 2008, the FDA denied Merck’s application to expand marketing of Gardasil to women aged 27 through 45. The FDA refused Judicial Watch’s request for a copy of the letter to Merck, stating that it may be available under FOIA.
Merck also failed to win approval to expand the vaccine to more strains and has reportedly dropped plans to do so.
Most tests with Gardasil were done against an adjuvant-containing “placebo,” rather than a nonreactive saline base, possibly making the vaccine seem safer than it actually is.
In its report to the FDA, Merck noted that “it is not known whether Gardasil can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman.” It reported that 27% of pregnant women experienced an adverse reaction upon receiving the vaccine, and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) contains 45 cases of spontaneous abortion following Gardasil.
A pre-condition for fast-tracking Gardasil was a requirement for a safety surveillance study, which will not be complete until June, 2009. Nonetheless, intensive marketing continues.
A total of 8,864 VAERS reports have been filed, including 38 of Guillain-Barre syndrome and 18 deaths, 11 occurring within one week of receiving the vaccine. Association, of course, does not prove causality.
The entire Judicial Report is available.
Mandating HPV vaccine is a matter of the public good vs. private rights, states Alexandra M. Stewart, J.D., who worked under contract from Merck with the George Washington University Medical Center to study Medicaid coverage for HPV vaccine. The intimate mode of transmission is “a distinction without a meaningful difference”; therefore, legal precedents justifying mandates should apply to Gardasil, she writes (N Engl J Med 2007;356:1998-1999).
In an article that appeared in MedScape on July 26, and was quickly taken off the website, Diane Harper, M.D., a principal chief investigator in clinical HPV trials, was quoted as saying, “The side effects that have been reported are real and they cannot be brushed aside.” She suggested that physicians not vaccinate patients with personal or family histories of the more serious complications, which have included neurologic disorders, thromboembolism, and autoimmune conditions.
“The cause of recent complications remains a mystery and it is difficult to know whether they are linked to vaccines,” the article stated.
Two physicians, a cardiologist and a rheumatologist, say they regret their decision to immunize their 17-year-old daughter and will not encourage his younger daughters to receive the vaccine. After being vaccinated, their eldest went from being a healthy athlete to a chronically ill patient. He worries that other girls may be struggling with immune damage, feeling achy and unwell, but going undiagnosed and unreported.
Gynecologist Christiane Northrup, M.D., appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show, told viewers that she wouldn’t advocate vaccinating her daughters, and that medical dollars were better spent elsewhere.
The FDA and CDC issued a joint statement reassuring the public and physicians of the vaccine’s safety.
MedScape was accused of “germ theory denialism” (apparently for suggesting that it might be fruitful to investigate how most patients successfully fight off HPV) and “antivaccination myths.” It was also criticized for having the “chutzpah” to run a poll on how physicians were reacting to the reports about adverse events and the FDA/CDC advisory, and the poll has apparently been pulled also.
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Poling case intensifies debate; vaccine-autism link worth investigating, says former NIH director
The U.S. vaccine court recently conceded that the brain damage suffered by Hannah Poling, who has a coexisting mitochondrial disorder, stemmed from her exposure to five vaccines. “I would not be too quick to dismiss Hannah as an anomaly,” writes Bernadine Healy, M.D., former director of the National Institutes of Health and a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
“Families are not alone in searching for a trigger that might explain why autism and autism spectrum disorders have skyrocketed,” she writes; “now they reportedly afflict about 1 in 150 kids” (US News & World Report 4/10/08).
In a May 12 interview with CBS News, Healy said that public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis that vaccines may be linked to the autism epidemic.
She told CBS that public health officials have intentionally avoided researching whether certain subsets of children are especially susceptible to vaccine side effects, to avoid scaring the public.
“I don’t think you should ever turn your back on any scientific hypothesis because you’re afraid of what it might show.”
CBS said that government officials would not respond to Healy directly, but reiterated that vaccines are safe.
Paul Offit, M.D., co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq, writes that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) “seems to have turned its back on science.” Instead of a preponderance of evidence, it now simply requires that an expert propose a plausible mechanism for vaccine injury. In the wake of the Hannah Poling case, he writes, “the VICP should more rigorously define the criteria by which it determines that a vaccine has caused harm. Otherwise, the message that the program inadvertently sends to the public will further erode confidence in vaccines….” (N Engl J Med 2008;358:2089-2091).
On Mar 6, CDC Director Julie Geberding claimed that Hannah’s case was a virtually one-of-a-kind case with little if any relevance to the other 4,900 autism cases currently pending before vaccine court. Then, on Mar 11, there was the “conference call heard ’round the world,” set up by the CDC’s Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Network. Some researchers said that mitochondrial dysfunction may be much more common that the previously stated 1-in-4,000 estimate (David Kirby, Huffington Post 5/15/08). Some speculate the genetic mutation could affect as many as 1 in 50 Americans.
Another case nearly identical to Hannah’s, involving a boy from New York, has recently been withdrawn as a test case for thimerosal. Only one theory of causation can be heard at a time, and it will be hard to deny the boy compensation on the basis that has just been found appropriate in Hannah’s case.
Hundreds of cases could follow this precedent. Some estimates of mitochondrial dysfunction in autistic children range as high as 20% to 30%, and in regressive autism, up to half the children may show signs of it, writes David Kirby (Spectrum Magazine 4/24/08). According to an abstract presented at the Apr 13 meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, 65% of 37 children with autistic spectrum disorders had oxidative phosphorylation (mitochondrial) defects, writes British attorney Clifford Miller.
During April, designated Autism Awareness Month, one expert denied not only a vaccine-autism link but the existence of an autism epidemic. Dr. Bennett L. Leventhal of the University of Illinois at Chicago said that the incidence of autism—the number of new cases over a certain time period—has remained constant since about 1943. Only prevalence, or number of counted cases, has changed, he claims (Courier News 4/11/08).
Clifford Miller challenges Leventhal to produce evidence backing up his assertion—and to locate all the aging autistic adults that the claim implies must exist.
The British Department of Health has hired a psychiatrist to track down the alleged 500,000 adult autistics in the UK and their alleged 500,000 full-time caregivers. The claims are obviously nonsense, Miller writes. According to the UK’s Office of National Statistics, the total number of adults caring for another adult who required full-time care for any reason was 326,000 in 2001.
Healy is the best-known “mainstream” American physician to speak out in opposition to the academicians and officials who either deny the existence of a pandemic or any chance of a link to vaccines. She asks why, over the past decade, the government hasn’t compared the autism/ADD rate of unvaccinated children with that of vaccinated children. And why do some in government treat vaccines as an all-or-nothing proposition? Either everybody gets vaccinated at the same time with the same vaccines, or nobody will get vaccinated and long-gone deadly diseases will re-emerge. “Personalized medicine” is done in virtually all areas of medicine today—except with vaccines, notes Sharyl Attkisson, an investigative correspondent for CBS News.
There are groups of unvaccinated children. In addition to the Amish, there are thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago. As far as physicians are aware, there are no cases of autism in an unvaccinated child—and only one case of severe asthma, writes Dan Olmsted (UPI 12/7/07).
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain all say they support research into the link between vaccines and autism (David Kirby, Huffington Post 4/22/08).
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