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Why are
American infants and schoolchildren being forced to submit to hepatitis B
vaccinations even though the French Health Ministry has suspended them in
schools because of evidence they can cause neurological disorders or
multiple sclerosis? (New
York Times, Oct. 3, 1998) Has America become a nation where the government can
force controversial medical procedures on children without allowing their
parents informed choice? If you think such things only happen in Communist
China, think again. Compulsory health treatment is on the march in the
United States.
"Force" is
not too strong a word. Across the country, newborn babies are being
injected with hepatitis B vaccine only hours after birth (even when their
mothers test negative for hepatitis B), and children are told they must
present proof of having received three hepatitis B shots before they can be
admitted to daycare, kindergarten, fifth grade or high school.
I first became
interested in the hepatitis B vaccine when, in connection with the birth of
two new grandchildren, I learned that hospitals are routinely injecting
newborns with the vaccine during their first 24 hours of life. A series of
inquiries produced no convincing medical reason or scientific evidence for
this procedure. My new grandchildren were not at risk for hepatitis B,
which is primarily an adult disease transmitted through bodily fluids.
Those most at risk are the highly promiscuous (heterosexual or homosexual),
needle-sharing drug addicts, health care and custodial workers exposed to
blood, and babies born to already-infected mothers.
According to a Centers
for Disease Control (CDC) report, there were only 10,637 cases of hepatitis
B in the United States in 1996, including only 279 cases in children under
the age of 14. Hepatitis B is not fatal for most who contract it, and it is
not epidemic except among high-risk groups.
For the problem of 279
children who have hepatitis B, millions of U.S. children are being forced
to submit to vaccination consisting of three hepatitis B shots (at about
$40 each)! The government isn't just trying to vaccinate the people who are
at risk for Hepatitis B -- that might "stigmatize" them.
Instead, the CDC recommends that all babies be vaccinated at birth
to be ready for risky activities a dozen years later. "Infants are
considered the easiest to immunize," says Dr. Walter Orenstein,
Director of CDC's Immunization Program. (New York Times, July 30, 1997)
To win parental support
for hepatitis B vaccinations, the vaccine police de-emphasize sex and drugs
as risk factors, instead citing alleged dangers from ear piercing and
contact sports. A hepatitis B coordinator said, "We didn't want to
have to battle people's moral philosophy over children's vaccinations and
having parents tell us, 'My sixth-grader doesn't have sex.'" ("Lining Up for Hepatitis
Shots," New York Times, July 30, 1997, p.B10)
More than 24,000
reports of hospitalizations and injuries, including about 400 deaths,
following hepatitis B vaccinations have been reported since 1990 to the
U.S. government's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There have been
no controlled studies to evaluate these reports, there is no adequate proof
of the vaccine's long-term safety, and little is known about the effect of
vaccines on a newborn baby's immune system. One nationally respected
vaccine developer has been repeatedly turned down by the National
Institutes of Health for a research grant to study hepatitis B
vaccine-related injuries. (Science magazine, "A Shadow Falls on Hepatitis B
Vaccination Effort," July 31, 1998, p.630)
Vaccines: the Key to
Federal Control
It's been clear since
1993 that the Clinton Administration is steadily working toward federal
control of the entire health care industry, and a major feature of this
control is to compile the health records of all Americans on a government
database. The 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Act gave the Department of Health and
Human Services the authority to establish "unique health care
identifiers" so the government can identify and track our medical
records. Thanks to Eagle Forum and other alert citizens, last year's
Congress postponed this authority until Congress takes further action.
The Clinton
Administration is using vaccines as the reason to build a massive database
of the health records of individual Americans. The bureaucrats expect
vaccines to be non-controversial because of the remarkable success of the
smallpox vaccine in completely eradicating that disease. Here is how the
Clinton Administration's plan works.
The 1993 Comprehensive
Childhood Immunization Act, signed by President Clinton, gave the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) $400 million to assist states
to computerize state vaccine databases, or registries, to tag and track
children's vaccinations.
The CDC uses carrot and
stick to force the states to obey federal "recommendations." The
CDC has the power to withhold money grants if state health officials don't
show proof of designated vaccination rates, and the CDC has doled out
hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to reward state health departments
for promoting mass vaccinations. States receive either $50, $75 or $100 per
child who is fully vaccinated with all federally recommended vaccines,
including hepatitis B.
In 1995, HHS Secretary
Donna Shalala gave the states the power to get access to newborn babies'
Social Security numbers in order to put them on vaccine tracking databases.
Now, the CDC is trying to link the state vaccine databases, or
registries, into a de facto centralized database containing every child's
medical records. Once in place, the national vaccine database can serve two
important goals:
First, the database
will enable the government to enforce mandatory vaccination of all
children, thereby conditioning Americans to accept compulsory control of
their individual health care. Although American children entering
kindergarten have a 97% to 98% immunization rate for most prescribed
vaccines (Statement
of Dr. Alan R. Hinman, Director of CDC's Center for Prevention Services, to
the U.S. House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, Mar. 7, 1990), government officials are
determined to let no child escape.
The federally monitored
vaccine database, which will have all children tagged from birth with an
I.D. number, will serve as a gatekeeper to deny the child admission to
daycare, kindergarten, school or college, or even access to medical care,
without showing proof of all required vaccinations.
Second, once the
vaccine database is in place, it will be easy to add all medical
records. This will accomplish one of the major goals of the Clinton
Administration's nationalized health care plan, and will be the key to
government's ability to dictate the giving and rationing of health care.
Before any of this
happens, it is vital to pass state privacy protections to forbid state
officials from sharing personal health data with other states or the
federal government. It's also important to keep the feds from preempting
existing state privacy laws, which Congress tried to do last year in the
so-called Patient Protection bill that fortunately did not pass.
How Are Vaccines
Made Compulsory?
Medicine used to have a
grand tradition of according patients the right of informed choice before
being given drugs or submitting to medical treatment, including the right
to refuse unwanted medical procedures. The only vaccination required when I
entered public school was for smallpox, and that's the only immunization I
ever had.
A national campaign to
enforce mandatory vaccination laws started with the Jimmy Carter
Administration, and then was aggressively accelerated during the 1990s.
Most states have now passed laws requiring children to be injected with
about 33 doses of 9 or 10 different viral and bacterial vaccines, including
three doses of hepatitis B vaccine, in order to enter public school. A New
Jersey court recently upheld the right of a private school to deny
admission to a student who objected to taking a vaccine.
When it comes to
vaccines, instead of "choice," some states tolerate limited and
hard-to-get "exemptions." Most states permit a medical
exemption, but that must be signed by a doctor. All but two states permit a
religious exemption, but that can be interpreted narrowly or
broadly. Some 16 states permit a philosophical exemption, but that
can be arbitrarily interpreted by state bureaucrats. There's a big
difference between exercising free choice or having to plead with some
government functionary to tolerate your exemption.
Where do these
intrusive and expensive vaccine mandates originate, and how can they be
enforced nationally since immunizations are a state, not a federal, matter?
The vaccine police have figured out how to override state authority (and
even overrule pediatricians who might otherwise act in the interest of
their patients). They have developed an intricate system of control outside
the spotlight of public scrutiny and without accountability.
U.S. vaccine policy is
set by a quasi-governmental group of mandatory-vaccination promoters called
the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), whose members are
appointed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). ACIP members can have
financial ties to the drug corporations, which is a gross conflict of
interest since the vaccine manufacturers' profits depend on laws that force
vaccines on all children instead of just those at risk. One would think
that ACIP's objective would be to promote the health of Americans or to
provide information to aid informed choices by patients, but it's not.
ACIP's stated purpose is "to increase the safe usage of
vaccines."
After ACIP and CDC
endorse a given vaccine, then state health officials move to make it
mandatory for all children. Sometimes the state law designates a specific
vaccine, and sometimes the state law delegates to the state bureaucracy the
authority to add a new vaccine to the mandatory list. The unaccountable
bureaucrats make regulations that follow CDC instructions and have the
impact of law. The drug corporations are involved every step of the way in
securing CDC endorsement of a vaccine and in lobbying legislators and
bureaucrats to make its use compulsory.
The New York Times
recently published a front-page report on how the pharmaceutical
corporations spent $5.3 billion last year sending their representatives
into doctors' offices and hospitals, with gifts and meals, to sweet-talk
physicians into using their brand-name products. The Times
headlined the news story: "Fever Pitch: Getting Doctors to Prescribe
is Big Business." (Jan. 11, 1999) The Times explained that "business is a big part of
medicine now." Indeed it is. But, of course, doctors have complete freedom
to accept or reject the drug corporations' sales pitches.
It's time to hear the
rest of the story about how politics is an even bigger part of medicine.
With a $5.3 billion marketing budget, the drug corporations can easily
afford to lobby thousands of state legislators and federal and state
bureaucrats to pass laws that force us to buy their products, particularly
vaccines. It is the mandatory feature of vaccines that makes them so
profitable for the industry. (How the Hepatitis B mandate was lobbied through the
Ohio legislature, bypassing the proper committee, with no notice, study or
debate, is described in "Hepatitis B vaccine for Ohio's kindergartners
unnecessary," Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan. 15, 1999.)
Vaccines are designed
to give us immunity from certain diseases, but the most interesting
immunity is the drug corporations' immunity from any liability related to
vaccine side effects, which Congress gave them by law in 1986. That,
combined with coercive state laws, has made vaccines extremely profitable
for the drug corporations.
Physicians who respect
the traditional Hippocratic Oath have a duty to work for the well-being of
their patients (rather than the good of society or any other social goal).
This presents a conflict with CDC vaccine policy, which is to promote
public health.
The American Academy of
Pediatrics (AAP) issues vaccination guidelines for pediatricians. In 1995,
however, the AAP and other physician organizations agreed to endorse
schedules determined by federal authorities. Some HMOs are requiring
pediatricians to achieve a near-perfect vaccination rate of their patients
as a condition of their HMO contract, and even be subject to on-site
inspection of records to verify compliance.
It's time to have a
free and open debate on the pros and cons of the policy considerations that
go into laws that make the use of drugs compulsory. Better yet, it's time
to give all parents the right of informed choice about medical treatment
for their healthy children.
Vaccines a Miracle
of Modern Medicine?
Smallpox has been
virtually eliminated from the face of the earth, and polio is well on its
way to the same fate. We don't hear much about diphtheria, whooping cough,
or scarlet fever any more, and the cases of once-common childhood diseases
such as measles and mumps have dramatically decreased. Conventional wisdom
credits vaccines for these remarkable changes. But there are many variables
and unknowns in matters of disease and health. No vaccine was responsible
for the dramatic decline of scarlet fever.
Vaccines are supposed
to fool the body's immune system into producing antibodies to overcome
viral and bacterial diseases in the same way that actually having the
disease usually produces future immunity. Natural recovery from infectious
diseases usually stimulates the immune system to produce a type of immunity
that lasts a lifetime. Once a child has had chickenpox, for example, he
will never get it again. However, vaccines provide only an artificial,
temporary immunity. That's why booster doses of vaccines are often needed.
Vaccines contain either
inactivated (killed) bacteria or viruses or they contain
live viruses that have been attenuated (weakened). Sometimes, live-virus
vaccines can cause the disease they are designed to prevent. The live-virus
polio, measles and chickenpox vaccines can cause vaccine-strain infections
of these diseases. Drug corporations grow the viruses and bacteria used to
make vaccines in either chicken or pig embryonic cell cultures, monkey
kidney cells, human embryonic lung cells, yeast cells, or other mediums.
Chemicals such as formaldehyde are used to inactivate the viruses or
bacteria. Vaccines also contain such additives as aluminum, thimerosal
(mercury), gelatin and antibiotics.
It is not clear that
the increased use of vaccines always promotes the health of individuals. No
vaccine is 100% safe or effective. We hear persistent reports that some
children, following vaccination, develop chronic health problems such as
seizure disorders, asthma, persistent ear infections, learning
disabilities, hyperactivity, autism, diabetes, arthritis, or other
autoimmune or neurological disorders. Virginia's Lieutenant Governor John
Hager is in a wheelchair because he acquired polio from the vaccine given
to his infant son.
Between 12,000 and
14,000 reports of hospitalizations, injuries and even deaths following
vaccination are reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
every year. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has already
paid out $925 million in claims for vaccine-caused injuries and deaths.
Nobody knows the real total of adverse reactions following vaccinations
because very few doctors report vaccine-associated health problems.
When we ask questions
of the scientists who created the vaccines, the drug corporations that make
and sell them, the public health officials who issue regulations, and the
legislators who pass laws forcing every child to be vaccinated, the answers
are unsatisfactory and disturbing. The more we ask questions, the more we
find that the subject of vaccines is not all based on science -- some of it
is politics.
Many vaccines are
required without publication of the risks and benefits. The vaccine
establishment's attitude is that such information unduly alarms parents
and, anyway, the government knows what's best for children.
New Vaccines Are
Coming Fast
A new live virus
varicella zoster (chickenpox) vaccine has recently come on the market.
Chickenpox is highly contagious but is a mild disease for most children.
More than 95% of all American children get chicken pox between the ages of
1 and 9, recover without complications, and have lifelong immunity. The
movement to make the chickenpox vaccine compulsory for all children is
moving rapidly. Maryland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts have
already used rulemaking authority to mandate use of the chicken pox
vaccine, and legislation is pending in several other states. Radio and
newspaper advertising for the chicken pox vaccine is designed to frighten
parents about the disease.
In 1998, the Food and
Drug Administration licensed a live rotavirus vaccine to block one cause of
infant diarrhea, even though the vaccine has been shown to be only 50%
effective.
The principal selling
point used by public health officials in mandating the new chickenpox and
diarrhea vaccines is not the health of the child, but that it will save
working mothers money from wages lost if they have to stay home with a sick
child. ("Cost-effectiveness
Analysis of a Rotavirus Immunization Program," JAMA, May 6,
1998 p.1371, concludes that this factor accounts for 3/4ths of the alleged
savings from the vaccine.)
More than 200 vaccines
for a variety of diseases are now under development by drug corporations
and government scientists, and there is much talk among government
officials about more mandates. A prominent vaccine policymaker has said
that all 12-year-olds will be targeted for injection with an AIDS vaccine
when it is put on the market.
Can Vaccines Be
Worse than the Disease?
The Economist, in an article entitled
"Plagued by Cures" (Nov. 22, 1997, p.95), stated: "There is growing evidence that
preventing diseases in infancy may be a mixed blessing. Can intervening in
an illness sometimes be worse than doing nothing at all? . . . The first
possible effect is the replacement of one disease by another. As the
incidence of childhood infections has fallen, a number of chronic ailments,
such as diabetes and asthma, have become more frequent. In parts of the
world where childhood diseases are still common, these chronic ailments are
rare. . . . Childhood infections do indeed seem to reduce the probability
of chronic disease -- an idea known as the 'hygiene hypothesis.' . . . The
second possible effect of intervening in a disease is that the intervention
makes the disease worse in the long term, not better. A number of viral
infections are more dangerous to an adult than an infant."
Science News, in an article entitled
"The Dark Side of Immunizations" (Nov. 22, 1997), reviewed several studies by New Zealand and by British
researchers showing that vaccinated children have a higher incidence of
asthma and diabetes than do unvaccinated children. The article notes that
animal studies indicate that an absence of contact with naturally occurring
viruses increases the risk of diabetes, and that research in humans
suggests that some childhood infections may be advantageous in priming the
child's immune system to fight off asthma. A 1994 study suggested that the
pertussis vaccination of infants may increase the risk of asthma five-fold
during childhood. (Odent
MR, Culpin EE, Kimel T., "Pertussis vaccination and asthma: is there a
link?" JAMA, 1994; 272:591-592.)
None of this provides
conclusive proof, so we need basic science research and large clinical
studies, conducted by independent, non-government, non-industry-financed
scientists, on the side effects and long-term effects of vaccines and of
multiple vaccinations. But neither the government nor the drug corporations
appears willing even to talk about this.
Who Should Decide a
Child's Care?
When it comes to
balancing risks versus benefits, it's not always obvious how to weigh the
risks. Parents, not government politicians or bureaucrats, should be
balancing the risks and benefits of vaccines for their own children based
on complete information.
State legislators and
state and federal bureaucrats are seldom physicians or scientists. They get
their information from other unaccountable bureaucracies such as the CDC
and from the lobbyists for the drug corporations. Scientists and physicians
aren't infallible. When I was growing up, tonsillectomies were routinely
performed on children. I now am glad my family couldn't afford that
unnecessary surgery.
Freedom in America
should include allowing parents to make their own informed choice about
injecting their babies with potentially dangerous vaccines. Parents should
do their own research. Helpful information about vaccines is available from
a non-government educational organization: National Vaccine Information
Center (NVIC), 512 W. Maple Ave., Suite 206, Vienna VA 22180;
1-800-909-SHOT; fax: 703-938-5768; www.909shot.com
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