Wellness 2000

Shots Heard 'round the World

Once considered the key to preserving public health, immunizations come under unfriendly fire

By Spider Rybaak

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate? For an increasing number of parents, that is the question. In Shakespeare's day, of course, immunizations weren't even an option. Back then, it hadn't occurred to anyone to infect someone with a disease in order to immunize him or her against future illness.

That didn't happen until 1798, when English surgeon Edward Jenner made the awesome discovery that inoculating humans with material oozing from the sores of cows infected with cowpox prevented smallpox. Vaccination quickly seemed so effective and proved so profitable, it's still around today. Currently, folks in developed countries everywhere are being vaccinated from cradle to grave for everything under the sun. In the past month alone, evening news broadcasts have been chock-full of public health officials imploring procrastinators to roll up their sleeves and bare their arms for a flu shot that will protect them against the season's latest strain.

That would be cool if nothing else had changed since Jenner's time. But the greatest boom to human health came after Jenner, as the discovery of germs led to better sanitation and hygiene, reducing our exposure to pathogens. Equally important, scientists learned of the benefits of a balanced diet. Gradually, the average American's life expectancy rose to levels unheard of since the days of the Old Testament.

But times are still changing, and for the worse. An increasing number of health experts see America heading for a sickly future. A society is only as healthy as its members, and the most important link to the future is healthy babies. Yet American children are getting sicker all the time, a disturbing trend, especially when you consider the recent, dramatic improvements in the most important ingredients to good health: our water, air and environment.

The Silence of the Needles

In his 1998 investigative report "Vaccines: Are They Really Safe?" (www.garynull.com), Gary Null, talk-show host, investigative reporter and author of 50 health-related books, presents provocative information on the history of vaccinations that you don't find in the establishment press, which profits from drug advertising. Null traces this conspiracy of silence all the way to an article published in 1912 in the British Medical Journal. Its author asked: "How is it that something like 80 percent of cases admitted into the smallpox hospitals have been vaccinated, while only 20 percent have not been vaccinated?"
Another troubling passage in Null's study is from Dr. William Howard Hay's 1937 address to the "Medical Freedom Society on the Lemky Bill to Abolish Compulsory Vaccination in the United States." In the speech, Hay said: "I have thought many times of the insane things we have advocated in medicine. One of the most insane {is} to insist on the vaccination of children. I know of one epidemic of smallpox comprising 900--and-some cases in which 95 percent of the infected had been vaccinated, and most of them recently."

The most frightening quote in Null's article is drawn from a study published in 1996, "Immunization Theory vs. Reality." In it, author N.Z.Miller wrote: "In 1950, before mass immunizations began, the United States had the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world. By 1986, the United States dropped to 17th place. Today (1995), there are 23 countries ahead of the United States, by now world-renowned for its appalling infant mortality rate."

Dr. Christopher Stahl of Finger Lakes Chiropractic of Skaneateles cites another set of revealing statistics from a study conducted by the Institute of Medicine in the early 1990s. The paper estimates that "between 12,000 and 14,000 hospitalizations, injuries and deaths following vaccination are reported every year to the Federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System."

Clearly, we're doing something wrong. Robert Weinberger, a homeopath based in Binghamton, puts the blame on vaccinations. "When we receive a vaccination, we overstimulate the humoral immune system's ability to produce antibodies." he explains, "which until recently has been the medical predictor of a successful vaccination. Rather than protecting against an illness, this antibody-stimulating action suppresses our body's innate cellular ability to respond to that illness." In other words, we damage our immune system by overloading it.

During the Vietnam War, the military's strategy of destroying villages to save them proved hard to swallow for the majority of Americans. Yet it could be argued that the medical/pharmaceutical complex is damaging and destroying children right here and getting away with it. For example, the Jan. 9 issue of Parade magazine contains the article "Don't Worry About Vaccinations" by Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, a snowy-haired, bespectacled physician with a disarming smile. In the piece, he repeats all the medical platitudes and ends with a list of the shots every good kid should have. Second from the bottom is Hepatitis B, followed by the explanation, "I also recommend Hep B shots for all infants, whether or not their mothers test positive for this virus."

And that's fine, until you read the sidebar, "Adults: Protect Yourselves," just below it. Here, the good doctor provides another list and recommends "vaccination against Hepatitis B for anyone at risk of contracting it {health workers, drug users or those living with a carrier}." This statement makes it clear that the doctor knows Hep B, like AIDS, is a blood-borne disease of special populations. So why vaccinate a baby against Hep B if the mother isn't infected and she and the child aren't shooting drugs or practicing anal or unprotected sex with multiple partners? Michael Belkin provided a simple answer in his May 18, 1999, testimony before the U.S. Congress: "Selling vaccines is extremely profitable."

As the pending SmithKline Beecham-Glaxo Wellcome mega-merger indicates, pharmaceuticals are booming. Drug companies influence consumers and the media by buying expensive ads in newspapers and weekly newsmagazines, on prime-time TV and on radio. They also make massive political donations. Perhaps it's not the protection of our youth that truly drives legislation mandating childhood vaccinations.

Gary Krasner, director of the Coalition for Informed Choice, a Web site for vaccine information, goes a step further. In his study "Another Phantom Virus," Krasner claims much of the danger publicized about some diseases is actually fabricated by vaccine manufacturers. He singles out rotavirus, claiming, "Not only is a virus not a cause of diarrhea {the major symptom of rotavirus}, but the so-called disease itself is just a natural condition in response to an inappropriate diet, and is effectively treatable by parents, without drugs." Since the shots cost around $38 a dose, potentially earning drug companies a billion dollars a year, he might have a point.

Up until very recently, the rotavirus shot was the newest sweetheart of the mandatory vaccination crowd. Yet it's fallen out of favor, according to Patti Mattingly, a nurse practitioner at Jamesville's Center for Mind-Body Integration. "Parents should not get the rotavirus vaccine for the children because of an increased risk of intussusception, a serious bowel condition that requires surgery to correct," Mattingly says.

Sad Side Effects

Michael Belkin, a New York City resident, testified to Congress because his 5-week-old daughter, Lyla Rose Belkin, died on Sept. 16, 1998, 15 hours after she was given a Hepatitis B booster shot. According to his statement, "Lyla was a lively, alert 5-week-old when I last held her in my arms. She was never ill before receiving the Hepatitis B shot that afternoon. At her final feeding that night, she was extremely agitated, noisy and feisty, and then she fell asleep suddenly and stopped breathing. The autopsy ruled out choking. The medical examiner ruled her death Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)."

Belkin calls the fingering of SIDS a "diagnosis of exclusion. It wasn't this and it wasn't that, everything has been ruled out and we don't know what it was." What disturbs Belkin is that nowhere in the coroner's report was it mentioned that Lyla's brain was swollen, "a classic adverse reaction to vaccination {with any vaccine} in the medical literature." Nor was it mentioned that she had received the Hep B vaccine a few hours before death.

All of which seems to confirm George Bernard Shaw's belief that physicians are "a conspiracy, not a profession. Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away." Fortunately--or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it--most reactions to vaccinations aren't fatal. If they were, the medical-pharmaceutical complex would lose all its customers, and that's no way to run a successful business.

Bonnie Franz, currently living in Ogdensburg, says her infant son suffered a more typical reaction to vaccination After he received his DPT shot, his leg turned red and he cried and screamed for three hours. "When I called the doctor's office, the nurse told me it was a normal reaction," she says. "But my instinct told me it wasn't." Several years later, the Virginia-based group Dissatisfied Parents Together confirmed that her son's reaction wasn't normal. Scarier still is her observation: "The nurse at the time did not report to any authority about an adverse reaction. Thus any statistic regarding adverse reactions and their reporting need to be circumspect; lack of statistics does not mean that there was no adverse reaction."

Kids aren't the only casualties. The military, for example, is having trouble getting the troops to take their anthrax vaccines. Many have refused and are risking being discharged under less than desirable conditions rather than be shot with stuff that they suspect is the major cause of Gulf War Syndrome.

Chittenango native Dan Sibley served in the Gulf War. Currently disabled and unable to work, Sibley is trying to feed his family on a pension that is less per month than what a minimum wage employee earns in a week. He suffers from a host of debilitating symptoms, including memory loss, headaches, fatigue, joint pains, acid reflux disease, rashes and irritable bowel disease. He's had two tumors removed from his neck, and doctors have located 10 more throughout his body.

Sent to Saudi Arabia as a combat engineer during the war, he recalls, "They never told us what the shots were. They only told us we had to take them or face court-martial." He received a total of 28 shots. "One shot took over 18 months to heal," Sibley says. "It would scab over, the scab would fall off, the wound would bleed, heal, scab over and so on. Now I've got a pit in my arm where the shot was given, right in the meaty part of my shoulder. I get awful rashes on the upper part of my body, generally on the site where the shots were given."

Pappy Patchin, director of the Onondaga County Veterans Service Agency, notes, "The anthrax vaccine was originally created for animals. At the time it was administered to troops in the Gulf, it had not yet been approved for use on humans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It was later approved for military personnel but not civilians. Many in the armed forces are refusing to take it because the government isn't providing any scientific proof it's safe."

For most adults, however, the only shot they may be getting anytime soon is a flu shot. Yet that immunization has been shown to be only about 70 percent effective, and the influenza virus is always mutating, requiring a new vaccine each season. The Centers for Disease Control folks have to look at chicken innards, crystal balls, you name it, to predict a year in advance which strain will sweep into America.

Currently it's estimated four strains are in circulation. If you only got one shot, better get three more. Better still, leave well enough alone. Writing for the Spotlight, a national newspaper published by the extreme right, Dr. Kristine Severyn says, "99 percent of people weather a bout of flu without hospitalization. Even CDC officials confessed that influenza vaccines are still among the least effective immunizing agents available, and this seems particularly true for elderly recipients."

Furthermore, the argument that the elderly are especially susceptible to dying from the flu is highly suspect. "Considering that more than 90 percent of pneumonia and influenza deaths occur in persons 65 years of age or older," Severyn writes, "but that about 65 percent of all deaths {from any cause} occur in this age group anyway, it is nearly impossible to prove if flu shots significantly increase life expectancy in the elderly. Indeed, one study of elderly Medicare patients in Ohio and Pennsylvania showed no demonstrated effect of influenza vaccine in preventing death or limiting the length of hospital stay.'"
Robin Restor, an LPN at Syracuse's James Square, observes that "flu shots seem to work for geriatric patients. They get mild symptoms, but that's it. However, my younger friends who get the shots always seem to catch the flu, while those who don't get the shot, never get it."

County health departments, however, see things differently, and urge young and old especially to get a flu shot. Yet some experts warn a menu of illnesses ranging from multiple sclerosis to autism and auto-immune disorders can be traced to reactions to vaccinations. They propose people should be made aware of the risks and then allowed to decide to take them or not. There are, in fact, laws on the books that exempt folks from mandatory vaccinations on philosophical or religious grounds. Yet parents are seldom told that, if they fill out the paperwork, their kids can go to school without the shots.

Humankind is made up of all kinds of personalities. Some walk blindly into the direction they're lead, even if that means taking unnecessary medication. Others don't think anything of corrupting their bodies with medication; indeed, the more pills they can take, the better they feel. And then there are those who only take medication when absolutely necessary, preferring instead to live healthy lifestyles and take their chances. The latter seldom get the flu more often than anyone else does.

For a true shot in the arm, go to the Global Vaccine Awareness League's Web site and click on "Legal Aspects of Vaccinations: Waivers and Compensation." You'll learn that vaccine manufacturers are exempt for being sued for adverse reactions, and that the government has set up a compensation fund designed to give speedy financial relief to relatives of those affected. Finally, you'll learn that most states have laws allowing you the right not to be vaccinated.

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