Parents and non-parents in Pagosa Springs — and elsewhere — have come to various conclusions about the safety and necessity of medical vaccinations. On one hand, we have the majority of parents in Colorado who are willing to adhere to the CDC’s recommended schedule of childhood immunizations, if for no other reasons than wanting their children to be allowed to attend public school without going through the hassle of filing an exemption application. Some of these parents, who have allowed their children to receive vaccinations, express outrage that a small percentage of parents can ignore the CDC’s recommendations, and leave their children unvaccinated, or only partially vaccinated.
This outrage is somewhat confusing. If I’ve allowed my child to be vaccinated according to the CDC’s schedule, then someone else’s unvaccinated child — infected with, say, the measles virus — should pose no threat to my child who is — theoretically — immune to measles, thanks to multiple vaccinations.
But the world is not so simple. Let’s take the measles vaccine, for example — one of the oldest and most respected vaccines in current use, typically delivered in the measles, mumps, rubella ‘MMR’ vaccine, in two doses during early childhood. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that 99% of children who receive two doses of MMR according to the recommended schedule should be fully immune to measles.
Thus, if a measles outbreak were to occur in a public school with an enrollment of 100 fully-vaccinated children — and any number of unvaccinated children — only one of the fully-vaccinated children should contract the illness. We might expect many, if not all, of the unvaccinated children in such a school to contract measles, which is highly contagious.
From a study of a 2011 outbreak of measles in a Canadian high school, published on ResearchGate.com.
Large Measles Outbreak in a High School in Canada: Lower than Expected Vaccine Efficacy in Two-dose Recipients
Between January and August 2011, [more than] 700 measles cases were reported in the province of Quebec, Canada. A high school was especially affected with 98 cases. We report the preliminary results of the school outbreak investigation which showed lower than expected vaccine efficacy (VE) with the recommended schedule. Methods: Cases meeting the criteria of the national measles case definition were identified by passive followed by active surveillance. Vaccination status was ascertained from written vaccination records…
Results: Among the 1306 students, 4.6% were unvaccinated. Among the 98 measles cases identified, 50% were unvaccinated and 42% had received two doses.
Let’s work the math. The school had 1,306 students, and we might make the assumption that almost everyone was exposed to the virus. 1,245 students had received one or two doses of MMR, and 61 students were unvaccinated. 49 of the 61 unvaccinated students contracted measles (which we might expect), as did 49 of the vaccinated students, including 41 who had in fact received the recommended two doses of MMR. This is not a 99% efficacy rate… but it does suggest considerably more protection that the unvaccinated children exhibited.
The long-range prognosis? We know, from centuries of human experience, that the 98 students — vaccinated and unvaccinated — who suffered through the ‘wild’ measles infection now have a lifetime immunity to the measles. But we don’t know if the remaining 1,196 ‘vaccinated’ students have a lifetime immunity… or if their immunity will disappear over time. We also don’t know if the ‘vaccinated’ students are protected against various new strains of ‘wild’ measles as they appear in the world.
We have limited evidence that the MMR vaccine might be a cause of autism in certain children, based primarily on anecdotal stories from parents who have connected the appearance of autism in their child with a recent vaccination. On the other hand, we have millions of pharmaceutical industry dollars invested in studies and media press releases, assuring the public that no such connection exists.
In 1798, a British doctor named Edward Jenner inserted cowpox pus into the arm of a young boy named James Phipps, intending to inoculate him against smallpox. Thankfully, young James survived the experiment, which led eventually to a worldwide program of smallpox inoculations.
222 years later… just how much do our leading public health officials really know about the safety of vaccines?
Here’s a 9-minute video distributed by one of the more outspoken critics of universal vaccinations, Del Bigtree, founder of the Informed Consent Action Network. The video shows selected clips from the World Health Organization (WHO) ‘Global Vaccine Safety Summit’ in December 2019. The video was edited to highlight the still-tenuous state of vaccine safety, as of 2019, and the lack of trust exhibited by many people — including some doctors — towards vaccines.
One of the discussions you hear in the video centers around adjuvants. From the CDC website:
Some vaccines that are made from weakened or killed germs contain naturally occurring adjuvants [that] help the body produce a strong protective immune response. However, most vaccines developed today include just small components of germs, such as their proteins, rather than the entire virus or bacteria. Adjuvants help the body to produce an immune response strong enough to protect the person from the disease he or she is being vaccinated against. Adjuvanted vaccines can cause more local reactions (such as redness, swelling, and pain at the injection site) and more systemic reactions (such as fever, chills and body aches) than non-adjuvanted vaccines…
To put this into everyday language, the human body doesn’t always mount a strong ‘antibody’ response to “small components of germs” injected into muscle tissue, so manufacturers typically include systemic ‘stimulants’ (adjuvants) such as Aluminum potassium sulfate in the vaccine. The addition of these (mild?) poisons helps activate the body’s immune response, and increases the creation of protective antibodies.
One of the expert speakers at the 2019 WHO Summit, quoted in the video above, notes that ‘antigens’ (AKA “small components of germs”) are not the main cause of vaccine side effects. That honor falls to the adjuvants included in the vaccines.
When I was born, in 1952, four vaccines were available to parents: diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and smallpox. These vaccinations were optional, dependent upon parental interest. Three of the vaccines were combined into a single formula (DTP), so children typically received five inoculations by the time they were 2 years old, and never more than one shot at a single visit. Back in those days, the incidence of autistic children — who were, back in those days, often lumped into the catch-all diagnosis of ‘retarded’ — has been variously estimated; one popular estimate puts the number at about 5 cases per 10,000 children.
The most recent CDC estimate puts the autism rate in the US at about 200 per 10,000 children, double the rate reported in 2007. The medical and scientific communities struggle to explain this apparent epidemic.
Between 1952 and 2019, the number of recommended childhood vaccinations increased from 5 to 87.
What does the year 2020 have in store? A new vaccine?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.