Can Vaccines Actually Protect the Vulnerable? A Comprehensive Summary.

Last month a young boy died in Italy from measles. He was more vulnerable than the rest of the population – he had leukemia and couldn’t be vaccinated. His brother also wasn’t vaccinated, and caught the measles from someone else (that part was left out – we don’t know) and passed it to his sick brother, who died of complications. In this case it was particularly sad as it was expected the boy would recover from the cancer.

Tens of thousands of Italians are also protesting the new mandates for vaccines, which the government has pushed following the recent measles outbreaks (they are not mandating just measles vaccines, but a total of 12 vaccines).

But are anti-vaxxers putting other children at risk? Let’s have a closer look.

Vaccination doesn’t guarantee immunity

Image credit Boston Children’s Hospital

I'll start with the obvious minor problem - that vaccines don't work for everyone. We know various vaccines range from 10-95% effective (10% for the years the flu shot strains were guessed wrongly. Most vaccines are said to be 75-95% effective).

For measles in particular, we know that the first shot protects 93% of the population. So 7% of children aged 1-4 and 100% of infants under 1 won't be protected. A second shot is supposed to cover an extra 4%, so from ages 5-20, 97% of vaccinated people are supposed to be covered.

(I could go down the conspiracy theory path and say it doesn't even protect against measles, but I'll stick with science, as corrupt as that can be, because there's enough mainstream information to build a case without getting into the corruption of it all!)

But we know measles antibodies wane – the MMR insert states that “antibodies to measles, mumps and rubella viruses are still detectable in most individuals 11-13 years after primary vaccination.” A recent study in Finland on people who had two shots of MMR showed that 5% of 22-26 year olds (who previously had immunity after 2 shots) had no protection, and 13% had waning levels.

In fact for mumps, 26% had no immunity, and a further 34% had waning levels. In an FDA study, a third MMR shot boosted mumps antibodies a lot for the first month but then dropped rapidly and the antibody levels fell back to where they had been or lower by one year. So the mumps component really isn’t very efficient and can’t be boosted (but I guess we should have known that, being that Merck has been in court for years over falsified efficacy data for the mumps vaccine).

Interestingly, it was thought that naturally acquired disease conferred lifelong immunity to that disease. However, it has been found that secondary exposure to the virus in fact BOOSTS the immunity (by boosting cell memory), so that those with naturally acquired immunity didn’t catch it again. The vaccine works much in the same way (except they wane a lot faster than naturally acquired immunity), in that vaccine-induced immunity also needs a booster to extend the memory of immune cells. Of course, this won’t happen if the vaccine stops measles from circulating, so there is no way the vaccine can be lifelong for people not exposed to measles. When someone with waning immunity or naturally low vaccine-induced antibodies IS exposed to measles, they can catch it asymptomatically with mild to no symptoms. It is estimated that 20-30% of the population will catch measles this way if exposed to an outbreak, it's just that unless they are being studied, no one will call it measles or even know they're sick.

Image Credit BBC

We are also forgetting about available treatments.

I’ve gotta say, it’s an emotive topic. Searching for stock photos of sick kids made me want to rush out and vaccinate my kids because I wanted to protect all of those poor kids in hospital! But would that do any good? Let’s look at the whole picture.
There are now specific immunoglobulins available if an immunocompromised child gets measles or chicken pox, as well as Hep A, B and Tetanus for those children and the rest of the population if needed, making vaccination for these diseases less necessary.

One must wonder whether this Italian boy was given measles immunoglobulin. One must also wonder, when transfer-factor products for leukemia patients have been so successful for other viral infections, that they have not developed one for measles? In fact, we know transfer factors have had great success in both chicken pox and measles, and other successful treatments include Vitamin C for encephalitis, Vitamin D to reduce pneumonia incidence and Vitamin A to reduce measles severity. We also know anti-fever medication is extremely bad for measles, and over-use of antibiotics has detrimental effects. Odd that things we discovered many decades ago have still not made their way into mainstream medicine. It's almost like they want measles to be more dangerous.

Why is it a better option to vaccinate (with risk of death and severe illness) millions of healthy children to create an environment that is low in one particular disease than to develop a treatment for the few children that need it? Is it my fault that medicine has ignored treatments that actually work, and that they abandon research into measles treatments because we have another option?

Do I think getting vaccinated with MMR will reduce the risk of measles for vulnerable kids? Yes, I do. Do I think its the best way to protect children in general? No, I don't. One tragic incident of measles is NOT a reason to say we need to accept flawed vaccines for millions of healthy children, or that we must not question vaccines, or that we must not even deviate from the schedule with one or two vaccines. And it is NOT reason that we cannot pursue other targeted strategies of protection for the weak and vulnerable that actually work better based on current science. I would love to protect the vulnerable. But vaccines don’t guarantee this, and they come at a danger to my child (which I'll touch on below), so at this point, I believe there are better ways.

Image credit Coppell Student Media

Let us not forget that vaccines CREATED some vulnerable populations

Vaccines have put teens and adults at risk for childhood diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox), which are not very dangerous for children, but can have severe effects on fertility, skin and joints when adults catch them. Many vaccines wane and leave teens and adults vulnerable to catching the disease right at a point where complications are likely to increase.

Vaccines have put infants at risk - after a generation is vaccinated, the mothers do not catch that disease and gain a strong natural immunity and cannot pass enough protective antibodies onto their babies anymore (vaccines activate a different immune response). Some of these antibodies last for 3 months, some up to a year. Is it any wonder when measles sweeps through it is now infants at highest risk of catching it? Funnily enough, for Rotavirus (which mothers these days were NOT vaccinated for and therefore provide naturally acquired antibodies to their babies) the CDC even recommends delayed breastfeeding for a time so that these highly effective antibodies can stop interfering with vaccines – they suggest delaying a very successful natural defense so that the artificial defense can do its unnecessary job.

Vaccines have also put the population at higher risk of chronic disease – often an immunocompromised child has a condition BECAUSE of vaccines, but this is rarely acknowledged or addressed. Aluminium, thimerosal, human DNA, food proteins and other ingredients have been implicated in many chronic conditions, such as allergies (which 1 in 13 U.S.children have), asthma (8% of the population), SIDS (leading cause of death in U.S. infants), developmental disorders (1 in 6 U.S. children and autoimmune disease (1 in 15 U.S. people.

We also have evidence to suggest that for healthy children, childhood diseases can decrease various conditions and cancers, for example, naturally acquired mumps may reduce the risk of ovarian cancer later in life and measles infections have reversed the growth of previous tumours. So by reducing these diseases, we may have inadvertently increased cancer. The FDA warns that residual human DNA (an ingredient in MMR) is also implicated in mutagenic action, and one has to wonder, did vaccines play a part in the Italian boy’s leukemia to begin with? I have no idea.

And look at the case fatality rate of measles these days. Back in the pre-vaccine era, measles deaths occurred in about 1 per 10,000 cases. Now the CDC says measles kills up to 1 in 500. With all our medical advances, better hygiene and living standards, we are so sick today that measles has become almost 20 times as dangerous as when there was no vaccination.

One in a million

I know some people don’t believe vaccines can cause these conditions. And that vaccine reactions are one in a million. I like Dr Paul Thomas to bring some reality to the situation.

Image Credit Dangers of Vaccines

He had groups of fully vaccinated (900 kids), those vaccinated on his own altered schedule (1000 kids), and unvaccinated children (238 kids). His own schedule includes removing the Hep B vaccine at birth, no HPV, only giving one at a time, and reducing aluminium-containing vaccines where possible. In the fully vaccinated group, he had an autism rate of 1 in 60, comparable to the national average of the U.S. His partially vaccinated and unvaccinated groups had no new autism. And his unvaccinated cohort had far less developmental delays and less sickness overall.

For the people who doubt the amount of reactions, I like to point to the electronic program the CDC wanted to put into place for monitoring adverse reactions to support VAERS in 2010. For the first month, 376,452 individuals were vaccinated and monitored, with 35,570 reactions identified. A little more than one in a million. So let’s update our numbers – take a deep breath, forget the mythical one in a million, slap some evil eyebrows on the CDC epidemiologists you were imagining in your head, and now understand it’s closer to one in TEN. Unsurprisingly (or surprisingly if you still think the CDC cares about you), the CDC gave up the program after a month with no explanation.

"What do you mean vaccines are making us sicker?"
Image Credit some European site

Vaccines can create MORE disease
And don’t forget the changes to immunity vaccines are capable of. While they can lower a disease that they specifically target, it often predisposes a person to become more likely to catch OTHER disease. So for somebody with leukaemia, other diseases – such as hand foot and mouth, or even just a common cold, can be devastating. Have a look at some examples of how vaccines can increase disease:

Vaccinations temporarily lower immunity - they deplete vital minerals and vitamins in the body while the body is forming a vaccine-induced immune response, lowering the body’s ability to fight new diseases. Because a vaccine introduces a virus or bacteria into the blood stream rather than the normal route of mouth or nose, the body develops no mucousal defences to ward off other bugs. In this short period, recently vaccinated people are more likely to catch one of the other thousands of non-vaccine preventable diseases out there and put an immunocompromised person in danger. This is why so many recently vaccinated children catch colds or develop infections.

There is also evidence of even longer term immune changes as the vaccine trains the body to react in a certain way (immunologic memory). This is helpful for vaccine preventable strains but can be detrimental for other strains and actually create an environment where other strains are MORE LIKELY to take hold than in unvaccinated people. We know that flu vaccines can increase the risk of other upper respiratory viruses by up to 5 times in the following 6 months. And the linked study even excluded the very short term lowered immunity due to mineral depletion as it excluded results from the first 14 days where it is ‘normal’ to get sick.

We also know the CDC is worried about how to tackle the new strains of pertussis because they flourish in vaccinated people:
"Our findings of an approximate 4-fold greater odds of having pertactin-deficient B. pertussis when up-to-date with vaccinations compared to unvaccinated is the first evidence for a possible selective advantage of pertactin¬ deficient strains." Furthermore, the CDC explains that the new strain has flourished due to highly vaccinated populations and has virtually eliminated the older strain. "The earliest pertactin-deficient mutant was seen in 1994; the next mutants were seen in 2010. In 2012, 85% of isolates were pertactin-deficient and in 2014, 100% have lacked the protein."

Image Credit Miami-water

Vaccines contain disease

And then of course there’s that old anti-vax catch phrase, “vaccines can shed!” meaning that any recently vaccinated person has a risk of infecting a sick child, newborn, pregnant woman or other high risk person if it was a live vaccine (common live vaccines are measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, oral polio and rotavirus). The risk is small for most of those vaccines, and not as high as coming into contact with someone who actually has the naturally acquired disease (as naturally acquired disease is more contagious), but the risk is still there.

For instance, page 3 section 5.4 of the Varivax insert says: "...attempt to avoid whenever possible close association with susceptible high-risk individuals for up to six weeks following vaccination with VARIVAX."

Image credit Dogs Naturally Magazine

All vaccines are not equal

And if we’re talking about vaccination (I mean, when people say you should be vaccinated, they don’t just mean measles – they generally mean the entire schedule) then let’s take a quick look at the rest of the vaccines. We know measles and rubella vaccines can reduce the disease and provide herd immunity. We know mumps vaccines can reduce the disease but not enough to provide herd immunity, and chicken pox, well, I won’t go into that, but it’s a bit of a failure. It’s making shingles explode in young kids, and it really doesn’t seem to be as effective as claimed.

But let’s look at the others in the schedule. Will you protect a vulnerable child or adult if you receive them?

Tetanus vaccines don't actually prevent contagious disease. So they won’t protect anyone but the person who gets it.

The CDC warns that pertussis vaccines do not prevent transmission to others, they merely reduce symptoms - based on an FDA study and states in their Pertussis FAQs: "Since pertussis spreads so easily, vaccine protection decreases over time, and acellular pertussis vaccines may not prevent colonization (carrying the bacteria in your body without getting sick) or spread of the bacteria, we can't rely on herd immunity to protect people from pertussis."

Likewise, the inactivated polio vaccine prevents symptoms but doesn’t prevent transmission. A Cuban study showed equally high counts of live virus recovered from the stool of children challenged with OPV, in both the unvaccinated group, and groups vaccinated with IPV.

This is the same for the diptheria toxoid, which, as a toxoid vaccine, was designed to counter the symptoms of the diptheria TOXIN rather than reduce bacteria and the CDC states that “an asymptomatic carrier state can exist even among immune individuals.” The vaccine fortunately does actually have an impact on the colonisation of bacteria (unlike pertussis) but diptheria really appears to be a disease that is very prone to poor living standards and bad hygiene practices and was well on the way down before the vaccine. Besides which, it is so rare, that not being vaccinated for it will not really put others at risk. Epidemics of diphtheria don’t spread very quickly in developed nations or even spread enough to constitute an epidemic. It doesn’t even exist where I live (Australia).

Some vaccines are for STDs or other adult-centred disease that a sick child will probably not come into contact with (Hep B, some strains of HPV). An unvaccinated child is a danger only if they HAVE Hep B, and even then, the chances of passing it onto an immunocompromised child are tiny.

Some vaccines reduce a bacteria but then promote the spread of competing strains instead and become more useless as time goes on (HiB, pnuemococcal, meningococcal, HPV). Look at Prevnar 7, which needed to be expanded to Prevnar 13, then Prevnar 23. Meningococcal C vaccine in Australia that also reduced Men B, but increased W and Y strains. We are playing with nature here, and the results surprise the vaccine developers and epidemiologists every time – it is a big guess.

Vulnerable children are still at risk of disease from all the new strains of bacteria and in fact any bacteria, as their immune system responds abnormally. Making EVERYONE get these vaccines promotes the competing strains to grow in prevalence, resulting in lower levels of vaccine preventable bacteria and higher non-vaccine preventable bacteria and may mean in the future the immunocompromised are MORE likely to come across new strains not covered by vaccines. If we just left these bacterial vaccines for the few vulnerable people, then the rates of the most common bacterias would remain more stable, meaning the vaccine would be more likely to actually protect against them.

These bacterial infections are not particularly linked to outbreaks either. They are very rare, and about 1.5% of cases are from an outbreak – the rest are random – meaning getting meningococcal or meningitis is not linked to other people, but instead linked to a particular predisposition or condition that encourages the disease in an individual’s body. So herd immunity may lower the chance of getting meningitis by 1% for a highly susceptible patient, not really a high enough number to warrant 9 extra doses of aluminium-filled vaccines for millions of healthy children.

So who puts an immunocompromised person at risk?

For a little back story, my husband is immunocompromised – with an autoimmune disease (CVID) that he developed soon after his 11th vaccine in his early 20s (DTaP). We had to decide whether getting our children vaccinated to protect my husband was actually worth the risk. It wasn’t. Particularly given the genes our children inherited and their subsequent increased risk of reaction. Interestingly, in Australia, our children would receive their 11th vaccine at their 4 month visit, not in their early 20’s, like us. We decided the risk was far too great, and the rewards of vaccination were far too low. My husband prefers to brave the slightly higher chance of measles (which would be almost guaranteed to give him pneumonia that his body would struggle to fight off) in order to give our kids a chance at a developing to their fullest potential.

Vaccinating has pros and cons, and will not rule out danger, neither are vaccines guaranteed to even lessen the danger for the weak in our population for many diseases. Let the scientists work on treatments specific to each case instead of relying on the Victorian era theory of mass one-size-fits-all health-damaging vaccines to stop some diseases that might even be beneficial, and give your child the chance to grow up healthy.

Image credit Red River Radio