A new philosophy of
COVID-19 is circulating through the Republican Party and conservative
media. If you look closely, you might notice that it resembles an early
philosophy of COVID-19 that circulated through the Republican Party and
conservative media: If young people get this disease,it won’t be so bad—and it might even be good.
Scott Atlas, the new White House science adviser and Trump-whisperer, seems to be the ringleader of this emergent corona-stoicism.
A neuroradiologist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s
conservative Hoover Institution, Atlas is not an expert in epidemiology
or infectious diseases. As a Fox News regular, his relevant credentials
seem to be more televisual than scientific.
“It doesn’t matter if younger, healthier people get infected,” Atlas said in a July interview
with San Diego’s KUSI news station. “I don’t know how often that has to
be said. They have nearly zero risk of a problem from this … When
younger, healthier people get infected, that’s a good thing.”
The
reality is that, so far, COVID-19 has killed fewer children and
teenagers than seasonal flu in a normal year, according to data compiled
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
(COVID-19’s fatality rate is much higher than influenza, but school
closures and lockdowns have reduced teenage exposure to all sorts of
infectious diseases.) A 25-year-old who contracts this disease is
approximately 250 times less likely to die than an infected 85-year-old,
according to the most sophisticated estimates
of infection-fatality rates. For every 1,000 people infected with
COVID-19 under the age of 35, the average expected death count is less
than one.* These facts might give you the impression that, as Atlas said, “it doesn’t matter if younger, healthier people get infected.”
But it does. It really does. Here’s why.
Many young people
navigating this pandemic are asking themselves a two-part health
question: What are the odds that I get infected? And if I do get
infected, is that really a big deal?
Muchof myreporting
has focused on the first question. To summarize that work in a
sentence: People are at highest risk of infection in communities with a
sizable outbreak, when they spend long amounts of time in closed,
unventilated spaces where other people close by are talking or otherwise
emitting virus-laden globs of spit, and everything is worse when people
aren’t wearing masks. This advice is easy to give, because the best
practices hold across the board, for everybody.
“What’s the big
deal?” is a harder question, because the person-to-person outcomes of
this disease are so maddeningly variable. The most universal answer must
begin with the observation that death is not a synonym for risk.
COVID-19
presents an array of health challenges that are serious, if not
imminently fatal. The disease occasionally sends people’s immune system
into a frenzy, wreaking havoc on their internal organs. Several studies
of asymptomatic patients revealed that more than half of them had lung abnormalities. A March study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that 7 to 20 percent of sick patients showed heart damage associated with COVID-19.
As my colleague Ed Yong explained, many COVID-19 patients experience protracted illness. These “long-haulers”
suffer from a diabolical grab bag of symptoms, including chronic
fatigue, shortness of breath, unrelenting fevers, gastrointestinal
problems, lost sense of smell, hallucinations, short-term-memory loss,
bulging veins, bruising, gynecological problems, and an erratic
heartbeat. And according to the neuroscientist David Putrino, chronic
patients are typically young (the average age in his survey is 44),
female, and formerly healthy.
We don’t know how many long-haulers
are out there. But by combining the conclusion of several well-regarded
studies, we can arrive at a decent estimate.
For men in their 30s, like me, about 1.2 percent of COVID-19 infections result in hospitalization, according to a July study published in Science. Once the disease has progressed to this point, the risk of chronic illness soars. Research from Italy found that roughly nine in 10 hospitalized patients said they still had symptoms after two months. A British study reported a similar risk of long-term illness.
Now
the math: When you multiply the hospitalization rate for 30-something
men (about 1.2 percent) by the chronic-illness rate of hospitalized
patients (almost 90 percent), you get about 1 percent. That means a guy
my age has one-in-100 chance of developing a long-term illness after
contracting COVID-19. For context, the estimated infection-fatality rate for a 60-something is 0.7 percent, according to the same study in Science.
You
might be used to thinking of 30-somethings as safe and seniors as at
risk in this pandemic. But if a man in his 30s and a man in his 60s both
contract COVID-19, it is more likely that the 30-something will develop
a months-long illness than that the 60-something will die, according to
this research. (The calculation above doesn’t even include the
countless long-haulers who never went to the hospital.)
More
frightening than what we’re learning now is what we cannot yet know: the
truly long-term—as in, decades-long—implications of this disease for
the body. “We know that hepatitis C leads to liver cancer, we know that
human papillomavirus leads to cervical cancer, we know that HIV leads to
certain cancers,” Howard Forman, a health-policy professor at Yale, told James Hamblin and Katherine Wells of The Atlantic. “We have no idea whether having had this infection means that, 10 years from now, you have an elevated risk of lymphoma.”
Why would Scott Atlas,
the White House, or anybody for that matter dismiss the threat to young
people? One answer is that they want to convince Americans that if a
bunch of teens and 20-somethings get infected, the U.S. will move closer
to the ultimate goal of achieving “herd immunity.” Briefly, that means
the point at which a disease, like COVID-19, can no longer trigger an
epidemic outbreak, because enough of the population has already
developed immunity. Atlas has argued that, if herd immunity is an
inevitable destination, we should perhaps put our foot on the
accelerator.
But the case for herd immunity rests on two dubious
assumptions. The first is that the disease isn’t risky to the people it
doesn’t kill—which we know to be false.
“If
you’re signing up for herd immunity, you’re also signing up for a huge
number of hospitalizations, and a substantial fraction of those people
will be sick for months,” says Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious-disease
researcher at UC Santa Cruz. “Do the symptoms last three months? Six
months? Three years? Nobody knows, but I wouldn’t want my pandemic plan
to be Let’s have hundreds of thousands of young people with lifelong illnesses.
I wouldn’t want to tell 30-to-50-year-olds that we’ve signed them up
for a high risk of heart disease and chronic organ damage.”
The second dubious assumption is that it’s easy to distinguish between the high-risk group and the low-risk group.
“The
most simplistic way to protect the vulnerable is to divide the
population by age, but you can’t choose an arbitrary cutoff and say
‘Let’s protect everybody under age 65,’ because nothing magic happens at
age 65,” says Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth. “The average
person who is 64.9 years old has the exact same health risks as somebody
who is 65. So it’s very difficult to divide populations into safe and
not-safe categories.”
Besides,
the U.S. is not, for the most part, spatially segregated by age.
Restaurants and stores serve old and young patrons, and there are tens
of millions of multigenerational households. Evidence that young and old
people mingle constantly can be seen in the recent COVID-19 death data:
A southern surge that started among young people spread to older
populations, who died in disproportionate numbers. “There is the
assumption that we can start cocooning the elderly, but we have no new
innovation here,” says Natalie Dean, an assistant biostatistics
professor at the University of Florida. “Are they saying we should try
harder to protect old people? What does ‘trying harder’ even look like,
compared to now? I just don’t understand the argument.”
Herd
immunity is an inoperable plan, teetering on a false assumption of
elderly-cocooning, which encourages young people to play craps with the
long-term health of their internal organs. The choice is yours. You can
listen to the scientists. Or you can roll the dice with your guts.
Amazon has
removed at least five vaccine documentaries from its streaming Prime
Video platform, all of which questioned the safety of vaccines.
Pinterest has also responded to calls for censorship and now blocks all
vaccine related searches
According to
the herd immunity theory, once a certain majority of people have been
vaccinated, the disease in question can no longer spread and everyone is
protected, including those who cannot be vaccinated
Herd immunity
doesn’t work the same way for vaccines like it does for naturally
acquired immunity, which confers a more robust, longer lasting immunity
that may be life long. While herd immunity often occurs in populations
in which a majority has had the infection, vaccines confer only
temporary immunity, which means that herd immunity is unlikely to be
fully achieved even if nearly 100 percent of the population are
vaccinated
Between 2 and
10 percent of vaccinations result in “primary vaccine failure,” meaning
those who get the vaccine do not gain even temporary artificial
protection after vaccination
Several studies
show disease outbreaks in populations with very high vaccine coverage,
where vaccine acquired herd immunity should have effectively prevented
the outbreak
I recently wrote about the renewed calls
for state legislatures to eliminate personal belief vaccine exemptions
and restrict medical exemptions, and how California state Sen. Dr.
Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, is even urging the U.S. Surgeon General to
push mandatory vaccinations to the top of the federal public health agenda.1,2
According to Pan, “unwarranted vaccine hesitancy” is a threat to
public health as it prevents “community immunity, which protects our
children and the most vulnerable.” He believes mandating vaccines, as
was done for smallpox during the Revolutionary War, would “protect our
right as Americans to be free of preventable diseases.”
Herd Immunity and Vaccination
What he’s talking about is achieving and maintaining so-called
vaccine-acquired “herd immunity,” the theory which maintains that once a
majority of people have been vaccinated, the infectious disease in
question can no longer spread and everyone is protected, including the
tiny minority who for whatever reason are not or cannot be vaccinated.
The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t work for vaccines.
While there is such a thing as herd immunity among populations in
which a majority has had the infectious disease and acquired a long
lasting natural immunity, vaccines confer only temporary artificial
immunity, and so true herd immunity is unlikely to be fully achieved,
even if nearly 100 percent of the population are vaccinated.
The measles vaccine, for example, wears off after about a decade3 or two. 4,5
Whatever temporary artificial protection is obtained from other
vaccines also fades in time. If you are an adult, chances are that some
of the vaccinations you received as a child are not protecting you
today.6
What’s more, between 2 and 10 percent of some vaccines result in
“primary vaccine failure,” meaning those who get the vaccine do not
gain even temporary artificial protection after vaccination. 7
Indeed, public health officials are now recommending adults born in or after 1957 to get revaccinated against measles.8,9,10
Since the Disneyland-related measles outbreak in early 2015, some
public health doctors are even suggesting all adults should get a measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) booster shot because as many as 1 in 10 previously vaccinated adults may be susceptible to measles due to waning vaccine-acquired immunity.11
Herd Immunity Does Not Work for Measles
It’s quite possible that revaccinating adults still would not
achieve herd immunity for measles. Dr. Alexander Langmuir is known as
“the father of infectious disease epidemiology.” In 1949, he created
the epidemiology section of what became the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC). He also headed the Polio Surveillance
Unit founded in 1955 after polio vaccine safety issues became public.
According to Langmuir and many other experts, one dose of the
measles vaccine was supposed to eradicate the common childhood disease.
But, of course, that did not happen.
By the early 1980s, more than 95 percent of children entering school
in the U.S. had received a dose of measles containing vaccine but, in
1989-1990, there were outbreaks of measles among school-age children
and college students. Public health officials responded by recommending
a second dose of MMR vaccine for all children. In an article published
in Clinical Microbiology Reviews in 1995, researchers stated:
“Measles, which was targeted for elimination from the United
States in 1979, persisted at low incidence until 1989, when an epidemic
swept the country. Cases occurred among appropriately vaccinated
school-age populations and among unimmunized, inner-city preschool
children.
In response to the epidemic, measles immunization
recommendations have been modified. To prevent spread among school-age
populations, a second dose of MMR vaccine is recommended at 5 to 6 or
11 to 12 years of age.”12
A 1994 study13
looking at measles incidence in Cape Town, Africa, indicated that as
vaccination rates increased, measles became a disease in populations
where the majority of children had been vaccinated. The immunization
coverage was 91 percent and vaccine efficacy was estimated to be 79
percent. According to the authors:
“The epidemiology of measles in Cape Town has thus
changed as evinced in this epidemic, with an increase in the number of
cases occurring in older, previously vaccinated children. The possible
reasons for this include both primary and secondary vaccine failure.”
This “startling” surprise challenged the theory that vaccine-induced
herd immunity would provide complete protection against outbreaks of
measles. The CDC has also admitted, and reports in the medical
literature have documented, that measles outbreaks occur both in highly
vaccinated school populations and among vaccinated adult populations.14, 15,16 ,17,18,19,20,21,22
Examples of Measles Outbreaks in Highly Vaccinated Populations
A recent example of measles outbreaks in a highly vaccinated
population occurred in Israel in 2017 in a military population ranging
in age from 19 to 37, which had “high measles vaccination coverage.”
The first two patients identified had both received two doses of
measles vaccine. Patient zero, a 21-year-old soldier, had documentation
of having received three doses. According to the CDC:23
“All patients except one had high measles IgG avidity, which is
an indicator of previous vaccination or previous infection. Because all
the serum specimens (except that from the primary patient) were
collected two to three days after the onset of symptoms, the high
avidity IgG was assumed to be a result of patients’ previous
vaccination.
Although outbreaks of measles among vaccinated populations have been reported worldwide,24,25,26,27 most outbreaks in Israel have occurred in unvaccinated or partially vaccinated populations).
Measles transmission from a vaccinated person with documented
secondary vaccine failure also has been described in New York City in
2011, including among vaccinated health care providers,28 and in the Marshall Islands.29 Waning of vaccine-induced immunity is a phenomenon that needs to be addressed …”
Another example is a 2014 study30
conducted in the Zhejiang province in China. Researchers found that
populations which have achieved a measles vaccination rate of 99
percent through mandatory vaccination programs are still experiencing
consistent outbreaks far beyond what the World Health Organization
expects.
What’s more, 93.6 percent of the 1,015 participants in this study
tested seropositive for measles antibodies, which theoretically means
they should have been protected against the disease.
The herd immunity threshold for vaccine-acquired artificial immunity is thought to be between 80 and 95 percent,31
depending on the disease in question (for measles, it’s 90 to 95
percent) yet, even though 94 percent of individuals had antibodies
against measles in this case, an outbreak still occurred.
Persistent reports of measles and other infectious diseases for
which vaccines have been developed and given in multiple doses to most
children calls the concept of vaccine-acquired herd immunity into
question.
Natural Versus Vaccine-Induced Immunity
Again, a key factor to consider is that many vaccines do not provide
long-lasting or lifelong immunity. Vaccines only confer temporary
artificial immunity and sometimes they fail to do that. This has been
shown to have important generational ramifications as well. Infants
under age 1, who used to be protected in the first year of life by
getting natural maternal antibodies from their mothers, who had
experienced and recovered from measles in childhood, are now
susceptible to measles from birth.
That is because most young mothers today have been vaccinated and
measles vaccine-acquired maternal antibodies are far less protective
than naturally acquired antibodies.32,33 To understand why this is so, you need to understand a little bit about how your immune system works.
There are two systems that fight disease in your body. One is the
innate system that is always ready to work and the other is the
adaptive arm of immunity. The adaptive arm consists of Th1 and Th2.
Both are necessary but Th1 is commonly known as the cell mediated arm,
and Th2 known as the humoral or antibody arm.
Most vaccines preferentially stimulate the Th2 or humoral part of
the immune system. Measured antibodies in the blood (antibody titers)
may be reflective of partial immunity, but it is not a perfect
correlate to full immunity that involves both innate (cellular) and
humoral (adaptive) immune responses, such as those obtained after
recovery from viral or bacterial infections.
The benefit of only measuring humoral immunity as a means of
measuring vaccine effectiveness is that it can be easily determined by
drawing blood samples and conducting lab tests. If specific
vaccine-induced antibodies are present in the blood and judged to be in
high enough quantities, the person is presumed to be immune to that
infection and protected.
Evidence of the profound importance and effectiveness of the innate
and Th1 immune system can be demonstrated in individuals who are unable
to genetically generate antibody production, a condition called
agamma-globulinemia. When individuals with this condition were exposed
to measles, they recovered just as well as those who were able to make
normal antibodies.34
They also had protection in the future upon re-exposure. This
discovery was made in the 1960s when measles vaccination programs were
just getting underway, and demonstrates that production of antibodies
is not necessary for the natural recovery from measles and acquisition
of protective immunity.
Other research35,36
published in 2011 demonstrated that antibody-mediated immunity is not
necessary to neutralize viruses like vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV),
again calling into question the idea that elevations in vaccine-induced
antibody titers are necessary to produce immunity against all
infectious diseases.
Delayed Infection Multiplies Risk
The inability to actually achieve herd immunity for many infectious diseases is by far not the only problem.
Using "mathematical analysis to explore how modern-era vaccination
practices have changed the risks of severe outcomes for some infections
by changing the landscape for disease transmission,” researchers have
found that by delaying the age of infection with vaccination, the health
risks are exponentially increased in vulnerable age groups within
populations. This Lancet Infectious Diseases study37 found that:
“[N]egative outcomes are 4.5 times worse for measles, 2.2 times
worse for chickenpox, and 5.8 times worse for rubella than would be
expected in a pre-vaccine era in which the average age at infection
would have been lower.”
The researchers point out that by making an illness rarer, it also
raises the expected severity when the illness arises in vulnerable age
groups. Now, the warning issued in this paper is that “remaining
unvaccinated in a predominantly vaccine-protected community exposes …
children to the most severe possible outcomes.”
What’s not addressed is the fact that routine vaccinations are
increasing the severity of illness that apparently cannot be contained,
as outbreaks are still occurring where vaccination rates are high
enough that the population should have established vaccine acquired herd
immunity.
DTaP Vaccine Increases Susceptibility to Pertussis
Yet another problem is that vaccination may raise your
susceptibility to that very illness and/or other viral illness. We’ve
seen this with influenza vaccination, where the flu vaccine appears to raise your risk of contracting other respiratory infections38 and/or more serious influenza.39,40,41 Another example is pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine.
As detailed in a study published in the February 2019 issue of the
Journal of Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, researchers stated:42
“The first diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DTaP) vaccines were
developed in Japan … Afterward, DTaP vaccines were developed in the
Western world, and definitive efficacy trials were carried out in the
1990s.
These vaccines were all less reactogenic than DTwP [diphtheria,
tetanus toxoids, whole-cell pertussis] vaccines, and despite the fact
that their efficacy was less than that of DTwP vaccines, they were
approved in the United States and many other countries.
DTaP vaccines replaced DTwP vaccines in the United States in
1997. In the last 13 years, major pertussis epidemics have occurred in
the United States, and numerous studies have shown the deficiencies of
DTaP vaccines, including the small number of antigens that the vaccines
contain and the type of cellular immune response that they elicit.
The type of cellular response, a predominantly T2 response,
results in less efficacy and shorter duration of protection. Because of
the small number of antigens … linked-epitope suppression occurs.
Because of linked-epitope suppression, all children who were primed by
DTaP vaccines will be more susceptible to pertussis throughout their
lifetimes, and there is no easy way to decrease this increased lifetime
susceptibility.”
The most important information is right at the end, so let me repeat
it by restating it: Children who receive the DTaP vaccine are more
susceptible to whooping cough; this elevated susceptibility persists
throughout their life, and nothing can be done about it.
However, what these researchers and public health officials also are
not admitting is that the whole cell pertussis vaccines (DTwP) used in
the U.S. between the late 1950s and 1997, when the less reactive
acellular pertussis vaccine DTaP replaced the more toxic whole cell
vaccines, is this: The B. pertussis organism started mutating into
vaccine resistant forms shortly after whole cell DPT began to be used
on widespread basis by children in the 1950s.
Whole cell DPT was failing to control whooping cough in the 1980s
and was found to have inferior efficacy compared to the purified DTaP
vaccines tested in worldwide clinical trials in the 1990s.
“As early as 1965 and all through the 1980s and 1990s, public
health officials in the U.S. and Europe knew that whole cell pertussis
vaccine in DPT was not preventing infections in many vaccinated
children and previously vaccinated adults,” said Barbara Loe
Fisher, cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information
Center (NVIC) in a report on pertussis vaccines published in this
newsletter during Vaccine Awareness Week 2018.
Just like before DPT vaccination programs, pertussis increases
continued to be reported in cycles of three to five years, including in
the U.S., where 95 percent of children had gotten three to five DPT
shots. Between 1986 and 1996, multiple clinical trials confirmed that
the less reactive acellular DTaP vaccine demonstrated superior efficacy
and effectiveness compared to the old and more reactive DPT vaccine,” she said.43
Despite this knowledge, health authorities feign surprise when
pertussis outbreaks occur, and continue to blame it on “vaccine
hesitancy” driven by misinformation. You may have heard that “highly
contagious” B. pertussis whooping cough is spreading among teenage students at Harvard-Westlake School’s two campuses in Los Angeles County in California.44
As of February 27, 30 students have fallen ill. What’s important to
note is that all of the students who contracted the illness were
vaccinated. School officials admit that inadequate vaccine coverage is
definitely not the problem in this case as only 18 of the 1,600
students in the entire school system have exemptions to opt out of the
whooping cough vaccine, and none of those 18 are sick.45,46
NVIC’s Fisher warns that the failures of DTaP vaccine are prompting
some researchers today to suggest that the old whole cell pertussis
vaccine (DTwP) driven off the market in 1996 should be brought back to
the U.S. and given to infants for the first one or two doses. “They
want to ‘prime’ little 6- to 8-week-old babies with ALL the bioactive
toxins in the whole cell pertussis vaccine’s crude brew. Apparently
they think it is worth the risk to pretend like they have fixed the
problem,” she said.47
Portion of Measles Outbreaks Are Attributable to Vaccine Reactions
So, is there really a rapid increase in preventable diseases? Or are
the vaccine failures just becoming more pervasive and vaccine
reactions more noticeable?
Circling back to measles for a moment, a recent paper48 in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology describes new technology developed to “rapidly distinguish between measles cases and vaccine reactions to avoid unnecessary outbreak response measures such as case isolation and contact investigations.” According to this paper:
“During the measles outbreak in California in 2015, a large
number of suspected cases occurred in recent vaccinees. Of the 194
measles virus sequences obtained in the United States in 2015, 73 were
identified as vaccine sequences.”
In other words, about 38 percent of suspected measles cases in the 2015 Disneyland measles scare were actually vaccine-related and not caused by transmission of wild-type measles. You may have noticed that each time a measles
outbreak occurs, it’s always blamed on the unvaccinated. Yet a portion
of those who become sick may actually have been sickened by the
vaccine-strain measles virus.
Cracking Down on Vaccine ‘Misinformation’
As I discussed in a vaccine article last week, the media is currently filled with reports of how tech platforms such as Google, Facebook,49 Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and even Amazon50
are fueling “anti-vax” fears and spreading misinformation (or doing
nothing to prevent sharing of vaccine safety related material between
users).51
Pinterest has already responded to calls for censorship and now blocks all vaccine related searches.52
Amazon has also pulled at least five vaccine documentaries from its
streaming Prime Video platform, all of which questioned the safety of
vaccines.53
It’s difficult to express just how harmful this censorship is for
public health, and what the ramifications will be if all these
platforms implement censoring tactics to prevent information about
vaccine safety (or rather lack thereof) from being accessed.
It’s especially upsetting when health authorities, Dr. Anthony
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (NIAID) among them, make statements that are in absolute
contradiction to established scientific facts.
Health Authorities Lie to Congress
In a January interview with CBS News,54 Fauci flat out denied the fact that vaccines can cause injury or death — this despite the fact that the vaccine injury compensation program
(VICP) created under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986
has paid out nearly $4 billion in awards for vaccine damage and death,
and that’s just 31 percent of filed petitions for compensation.55
In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court also declared that government
licensed and recommended childhood vaccines mandated by states are
"unavoidably unsafe.”56
What’s worse, Fauci recently made false statements before Congress
about MMR vaccine reactions in what appeared to be an attempt to
reassure legislators that vaccines are completely safe and do not cause
serious reactions, such as encephalitis (brain inflammation). As
reported by NVIC’s Barbara Loe Fisher:57
“On Feb. 27, 2019, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Oversight and
Investigations held a public hearing on ‘Confronting a Growing Public
Health Threat: Measles Outbreaks in the U.S.’58 that was also broadcast live on C-span.
Parents across the nation watched and heard the renowned Anthony
Fauci, MD … either tell a bald-faced lie or show his ignorance when he
testified, under oath, that MMR vaccine does not cause encephalitis.
This large dose of disinformation drew gasps of protest from
parents attending the Capitol Hill hearing and prompted committee chair
Diana DeGette, D-Colo., to bang the gavel and warn that ‘manifestations
of approval or disapproval of the proceedings is in violation of the
rules of the House and this Committee.’
It is really hard to watch a distinguished physician like Dr.
Fauci mislead legislators by blatantly denying the damage that serious
vaccine reactions like brain inflammation can do to children’s brains.”
Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for
Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, also misinformed legislators
holding the congressional hearing that was broadcast live and watched
by families across the nation.
Messonnier stated, “There are rare instances in children with
certain very specific underlying problems with their immune system in
whom the vaccine is contraindicated,” but she said that the MMR vaccine
“does not cause brain swelling and encephalitis” in healthy children,
and that parents would know if their child was at risk beforehand,
because their child’s doctor would tell them if this were the case.
According to Merck and CDC, MMR Vaccine Can Cause Brain Inflammation
Fisher goes on to present evidence for why Fauci and Messonnier are
both wrong, and are in fact presenting Congress with false information.
For starters, the MMR vaccine package insert59
published by Merck states that “Encephalitis and encephalopathy have
been reported approximately once for every 3 million doses of M-M-R II
or measles-, mumps- and rubella-containing vaccine.”
The vaccine information statement (VIS) that doctors are by federal
law required to give parents before their children receive a CDC
recommended vaccine states that “severe” adverse effects of the MMR60 and MMRV61 vaccines include “deafness; long-term seizures, coma, lowered consciousness; and brain damage.”
One of the “moderate” adverse events associated with the MMRV
vaccine is encephalitis. Fisher also goes through some of the medical
literature showing the MMR vaccine can cause encephalitis and
encephalopathy. For more data, I recommend reading Fisher’s article62 in its entirety.
“Parents, who trusted and did what they were told to do when they
took their healthy children into a doctor’s office to be vaccinated
and then watched their children suffer brain inflammation and regress
into chronic poor health, learn that it is not a good idea to believe
everything that doctors say about vaccines.
People who were healthy, got vaccinated and were never healthy
again, quickly learn how to tell the difference between a doctor telling
the truth about vaccine safety and one who is not, because their lives
depend upon it.
If public health officials can go before Congress and provide
demonstrably false statements about MMR vaccine reactions, what else are
they fooling the public about?” Fisher writes.
Forced Vaccination Violates Human Rights
In a February 25, 2019, letter63
to the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, Physicians for
Informed Consent urge the committee to make note of and correct a
number of errors in its memorandum for its “Confronting a Growing
Public Health Threat: Measles Outbreaks in the U.S.” meeting. Among the
errors:
• The claim that one or two deaths occur
per 1,000 children who acquire measles is an erroneous calculation
error. At most, there is one death per 6,000, but more likely one death
per 10,000. (For an explanation of the data for these figures, see the
original letter) • The claim that “CDC has determined
that receiving the MMR vaccine is safer than getting any of the
viruses” has not been scientifically demonstrated. According to
Physicians for Informed Consent:
“In 2017, we reported in The British Medical Journal64
that every year an estimated 5,700 U.S. children (approximately 1 in
640) suffer febrile seizures from the first dose of the MMR vaccine —
which is five times more than the number of febrile seizures expected
from measles.
This amounts to 57,000 febrile seizures over the past 10 years
due to the MMR vaccine alone. As 5 percent of children with a history
of febrile seizures progress to epilepsy, a debilitating and
life-threatening chronic condition, the estimated number of children
whose epilepsy is due to the MMR vaccine in the past 10 years is 2,850.
In addition, we contend that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting
System (VAERS), as a passive surveillance system, does not adequately
capture vaccine side effects and that serious side effects, including
permanent neurological harm and death from the MMR and other vaccines,
may similarly be underreported.”
Speaking out against calls for forced vaccinations, the Association
of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) sent a statement on federal
vaccine mandates65,66
to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on
February 26, 2019, saying forced vaccinations are unnecessary and
violate human rights, and that the AAPS “strongly opposes federal
interference in medical decisions, including mandated vaccines.”
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