(1) No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings…
— 42 U.S. Code § 300aa–22 – Standards of responsibility: Paragraph (b)
As of May 10, Southwest Colorado had seemingly avoided serious health impacts from the coronavirus pandemic. Fewer than 100 cases of infection had been reported; two deaths had occurred in Montezuma County, and one was reported in La Plata County. (You can view the New York Times COVID map here.)
The economic impacts of the ‘social distancing’ orders in Southwest Colorado are more serious — but impossible to calculate with any certainty. Are the impacts temporary? Will the economy ‘bounce back’ stronger than ever?
Will Southwest Colorado still be hurting… 12 months from now? Or will we all be safely immune to SARS-CoV-2… having been injected with an innovative new vaccine?
As we noted in Part Two of this editorial series, medical science has been dealing with various coronaviruses for many years. Coronaviruses were first identified in animals in the 1930s; a human coronavirus was first isolated in 1960, taken from a boy experiencing the symptoms of the ‘common cold.’ Other human coronaviruses have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HCoV HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and — of course — SARS-CoV-2 in 2019. We recognize that coronaviruses are especially dangerous to people with compromised immune systems, and often relatively harmless in people with strong immune systems.
Wikipedia features a lengthy 4,000 word essay on coronaviruses which includes just one sentence referencing vaccines and drugs.
There are as yet no vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.
Science has known about the health impacts of coronaviruses since 1960, but has thus far been unable to develop a vaccine or effective anti-viral drug. So the only defense, at the moment, appears to be ‘a strong immune system.’ We assume science knows something about how to encourage strong immune systems… but all we hear about in the media, coming from the mouths of public health officials, is that we need a vaccine, desperately… knowing that science has been unable to produce an effective coronavirus vaccine in 60 years of trying.
Just as importantly, science has been unable to produce a totally safe vaccine.
What is a safe vaccine? Some people might say, it’s a vaccine that does no harm. But as far as I can tell, there’s never been a vaccine invented that doesn’t produce occasional harmful effects. We’re always rolling the dice when we administer vaccines to people who seem to be healthy, but have compromised immune systems, or allergic reactions. In Part Three, for example, we discussed the heightened incidence of Guillain-Barré syndrome among persons receiving the 1976 swine flu immunizations.
The pharmaceutical companies that produce vaccines have been very clear about the risks. They have consistently refused to produce vaccines unless they are protected against liability claims. So in 1986, the US government passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), to let pharmaceutical off the hook for any injury or death caused by a vaccine. Instead, the US taxpayers are on the hook, because injuries and deaths — which continue to occur — are financially compensated by the US Health Resources and Services Administration. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) allows individuals to file a petition for compensation when alleged injury or death has been caused by a vaccine. As of April 2020, the HRSA had paid out $4.4 billion on vaccine injury claims.
I learned just last week about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. I wonder how many Americans are aware of this program…?
What percentage of Americans — vaccinated or not — understand the US vaccine program in any depth? I certainly don’t. Similarly, I don’t understand GMOs or pesticides in any depth, but I make an effort to purchase organic and non-GMO foods. And I avoid vaccinations like the plague. These personal decisions have minimal effect on the world at large, but could possibly have significant effects on my own immune system.
I suspect I was probably inoculated with the DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccination as a child, back in the early 1950s. The DPT vaccine was approved for human use in 1949. The other day, I downloaded a National Academy of Sciences study from the National Institutes of Health website (download it here). The study was written in 1985, and it reads, in part:
The pertussis vaccine component of diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) vaccine is associated with convulsions in one of 1,750 doses,while severe and permanent neurologic damage has been calculated to occur with one of every 310,000 doses. Although the benefits of the current pertussis vaccination program outweigh the risks by a considerable margin, development of a safer, efficacious vaccine is an important goal…
Unlike the diphtheria and tetanus components, the pertussis component — since 1949 — was so-called ‘whole cell’ and was causing injury and distress in a significant number of cases. Perhaps what we needed was an ‘acellular’ version of the pertussis component? Instead of including ‘whole’ pertussis bacteria, perhaps we needed a version that included ‘pieces’ of the pertussis bacterium instead…?
Just such an ‘acellular’ vaccine was approved for use in infants in 1996 — the DTaP vaccine. So we can calculate that doctors administered a sometimes dangerous DPT vaccine to babies for 47 years, before the DTaP vaccine was approved. (My first child, born in 1977, was one of the infants who suffered convulsions immediately following a DPT vaccination, but our pediatrician couldn’t confirm that the vaccination was the cause of the convulsions… so it was never reported.) It then turned out the DTaP vaccine was less effective than the DPT vaccine. In fact, the CDC now reports that the pertussis vaccine does not confer immunity at all:
Vaccinated children and adults can become infected with and spread pertussis; however, disease is typically much less serious in vaccinated people.
Cases of pertussis have seen a significant increase in recent years, increasing from 1,759 cases in 1973 to around 20,000 cases per year over the past decade. The worst US outbreak in recent years took place in 2012, with 48,277 reported cases. (Many cases likely went unreported, as is typical of any disease outbreak.) In 2018, 10 people are known to have died of pertussis in the US.
As I said, I certainly don’t understand the US vaccination program.