For example, take this statement from the AAP:

KEEP A CLEAR AND UP-TO-DATE RECORD OF IMMUNIZATIONS. This can help doctors do a better job of diagnosing a problem in an emergency. For example, if your child has a bad infection, and the doctor knows your child has been vaccinated against Hepatitis, the doctor can rule that out. This can save time.

This is basically stating that if your child has been vaccinated for a particular disease, that disease can be ruled out right away to make everyone’s life easier.  The problem is that this assumes that vaccinations are 100% effective, which even the most glowing vaccine reports can’t say.  Inside Vaccines has a list of VPDs with the information from the vaccine inserts stating their efficacy.  A quick look at the Hepatitis information (taken directly from the manufacturer’s statements) shows that the Hep B vaccine is only 50% effective after 1 dose, and 70-90% after multiple doses.

A look at the DTaP information shows it as being 59-89% effective.  But if you bring your child into a doctor with a persistent cough, wheezing, etc. and he or she has been vaccinated, your doctor is much more likely to diagnose bronchitis or atypical asthma than whooping cough, especially if the doctor hasn’t heard the cough (and therefore the characteristic whoop).  And of course, if diseases aren’t getting diagnosed properly, it makes the vaccines look more effective than they are, so the 59-89% efficacy rate might actually be quite high.  A New Zealand study published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology found that the efficacy rate might be as low as 33%.

Another example is chicken pox (varicella).  I know of more than one parent who brought their vaccinated child to the doctor’s with a suspicious rash and known exposure to chicken pox, only to be told it couldn’t be chicken pox because they’ve been vaccinated.  The official diagnosis in most of these cases ends up being: “a varicella-like viral infection”, and the treatment suggested is the same as would be suggested for chicken pox, but the vaccine is still considered to have worked.  This is anecdotal of course.  The official documentation states the vaccine is 83% effective after one dose and 98% effective after two doses, but both the Journal of Infectious Diseases and The New England Journal of Medicine have published studies showing an effectiveness closer to 44%.

Besides a lower rate of diagnosis, another way that cases can be shown to be dropping is by changing the diagnostic criteria, as happened in the case of polio.  If you’re interested, there are a lot of quotes on that website about how the definition for polio was changed and the effects that had on the diagnosis of the disease and how it made the vaccine look effective.  Here is one explanation.

Dr. Bernard Greenberg, a biostatistics expert, was chairman of the Committee on Evaluation and Standards of the American Public Health Association during the 1950s. He testified at a panel discussion that was used as evidence for the congressional hearings on polio vaccine in 1962. During these hearings he elaborated on the problems associated with polio statistics and disputed claims for the vaccine’s effectiveness. He attributed the dramatic decline in polio cases to a change in reporting practices by physicians. Less cases were identified as polio after the vaccination for very specific reasons.

Prior to 1954 any physician who reported paralytic poliomyelitis was doing his patient a service by way of subsidizing the cost of hospitalization and was being community-minded in reporting a communicable disease. The criterion of diagnosis at that time in most health departments followed the World Health Organization definition: “Spinal paralytic poliomyelitis: signs and symptoms of nonparalytic poliomyelitis with the addition of partial or complete paralysis of one or more muscle groups, detected on two examinations at least 24 hours apart.” Note that “two examinations at least 24 hours apart” was all that was required. Laboratory confirmation and presence of residual paralysis was not required.

In 1955 the criteria were changed to conform more closely to the definition used in the 1954 field trials: residual paralysis was determined 10 to 20 days after onset of illness and again 50 to 70 days after onset…. This change in definition meant that in 1955 we started reporting a new disease, namely, paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer-lasting paralysis. Furthermore, diagnostic procedures have continued to be refined. Coxsackie virus infections and aseptic meningitis have been distinguished from paralytic poliomyelitis. Prior to 1954 large numbers of these cases undoubtedly were mislabeled as paralytic poliomyelitis. Thus, simply by changes in diagnostic criteria, the number of paralytic cases was predetermined to decrease in 1955-1957, whether or not any vaccine was used.

One other thing to keep in mind when looking at disease statistics is that because of this misdiagnosis, many diseases look worse than they really are.  For example, a disease might only be diagnosed properly because a patient is presenting with the worst symptoms, or needs to be hospitalized, while children who are mostly asymptomatic or only minorly ill may not be brought to a doctor at all or are misdiagnosed.  This would of course skew the statistics to make it look like that disease hospitalizes a lot more children than the reality.  For a really good explanation of this along with lots of citations, have a look at the measles page on Inside Vaccines.

I am still planning on writing my thoughts on the various diseases we vaccinate against.  In the meantime, I highly recommend that anyone interested in vaccinations at all include the Inside Vaccines website in their research.  There is a lot of good information and studies linked, along with citations and references to lead you to more material to read.  They have an excellent article entitled “Where to Start?” for parents who are just beginning to research the issue, which provides places to search for information on both sides of the issue.

Part 1 – Padding the Pockets of Big Pharma…

Related posts:

1. Padding the Pockets of Big Pharma…
2. Animal Vaccinations
3. Throw away the Deet…

When you get past the fear mongering about the diseases and the vaccines, you can look at the real root of the issue.  Do vaccines work?  Are they necessary?  Are they responsible for the abolishment of polio, small pox, etc?  Are the diseases they’re meant to prevent really as bad as Merck et al would have you believe?  Are the vaccines as bad as the anti-vaccine enthusiasts would have you believe?  I do have a bias, as I am one of those anti-vaccine enthusiasts, but we did a lot of reading, researching, and soul searching before we came to our decision.  It wasn’t made lightly, and we believe we are doing the best thing for our daughter to help her develop a healthy immune system.  We also have a naturopath, three chiropractors, and our GP (yes, an MD), who all not only support the decision, but most (if not all) of them would not or have not vaccinated their own children.

That being said, please don’t take this post as a recommendation from me.  It is a personal decision not to be made lightly, and parents need to make a decision they can live with.  That is to say, if something goes wrong, will you forever be blaming yourself and others, or will you know you did what you thought best.  Really, years could be spent studying vaccines, their effects, how they work, etc.  There is so much information already out there.  I’m just going to touch on some of the things that helped Kris and I come to our decision.  I could write pages on this one subject, so I’m just going to be doing posts that cover one aspect at a time.  I am not writing this to spur a vaccine debate, but to share some thoughts and links for those who may be doing their own research or anyone who is interested in another point of view.

First, some links.  A friend recently linked this article to me, A Shot in the Dark, which makes for an interesting read and approaches the issue a little differently than other posts about vaccines I’ve read.  Here is the transcript for the meeting she mentions in which one of the immunologists comments he didn’t want his grandson to get thimerosol-containing vaccines.  This is another interesting article about tactics the CDC uses to try and scare a population into vaccinating.

For Kris and I, the key question was not, “Are vaccines effective?”.  I know people who don’t believe they are, but the reality is that scientific evidence supports the fact that vaccines are effective.  Here’s an interesting article with a great discussion on how pharmaceutical companies use semantics to make drugs sound more effective than they are.

There are many other tricks to make that effectiveness of drugs sound impressive. If you take alendronate (Fosamax), the most frequently prescribed drug for osteoporosis, you can be excused for thinking it lowered your risk of a hip fracture by 50 percent. That’s what the ads targeted to doctors claimed. Fifty percent is a most impressive claim, which means that half the women taking it will benefit. One in two. Not bad, eh?

If you look closer at the actual study, you find that for women on placebo, two women out of a hundred had a hip fracture (two percent). In the women on Fosamax, one woman out a hundred (one percent) had a hip fracture. In other words, you can lower your risk of hip fracture from two percent to one percent, an impressive 50 percent reduction. But 50 percent sounds impressive even though it is really only a one percent difference; that is, only one woman out of a hundred taking the drug saw any benefit. The company can promote this drug legally as being “significant” and “effective,” when, in fact, 99 percent of the women who took that drug had no effect whatsoever. They wasted their money, exposed themselves to the adverse effects of the drug and saw no benefit.

No, for us, the question was more like: “Are they necessary?” Questions that followed this one were: “Are vaccines responsible for wiping out disease?” “Even if so, is that necessarily a good thing?” “Are the diseases as bad as we’re told?” “Are vaccines safe?”

Reading through the CDC website for information for this post has been interesting for me.  There are all sorts of broad, sweeping statements disguised as “facts”, lots of fear mongering… Statements like disease can cause death and vaccines are generally safe.  They don’t say that vaccines can cause death and diseases are generally safe too.  (But I’ll go more into that in the future.)  For now, let’s take this statement from their website:

Perhaps the greatest success story in public health is the reduction of infectious diseases resulting from the use of vaccines. Routine immunization has eradicated smallpox from the globe and led to the near elimination of wild polio virus. Vaccines have reduced some preventable infectious diseases to an all-time low, and now few people experience the devastating effects of measles, pertussis, and other illnesses.

Let’s take a look at their evidence for this. This graph shows a sharp decline in measles after the introduction of the vaccine in 1963, and we are now at an all-time low.  It looks very impressive.  Until we look at a graph over a longer time period.

This graph shows a completely different picture, that deaths from measles were already on the decline long before the vaccine was introduced.

The same could be shown for most of the vaccine-preventable diseases. By not showing the complete picture, it’s easy to see why most people believe vaccines responsible for eradicating diseases. (Note: This is the same trick Al Gore uses in his movie when he shows graphs.) I do want to point out that the CDC one refers to cases of measles, while the others refer to deaths by the diseases. I tried to find a CDC one to show deaths or an over-time one to show cases, but came up short.  Honestly, I didn’t search that hard.  I was reading a direct comparison that showed a table with cases and deaths on it, but I can’t find it now.  When I have a moment I’ll search my history and put it here. The best I could find right now is an explanation, not a pretty graph, but it is on the vaccination news website.  There are more graphs and charts on the Vaccination Liberation site as well. Regardless, the graph does show that death from measles had dropped to near zero before the vaccine was even introduced.  When this is pointed out to the CDC, they plot another graph, for one disease only, and for cases only 10 years previous to the vaccine.

Another thing the CDC points out is that small pox vaccination programs eradicated the disease.  This has been shown again and again to be untrue, due to the fact that pockets of the population where vaccines were limited or nonexistent experienced a decrease in small pox outbreaks at the same rate as everywhere else.

Parenthetically, the average person today believes that mass smallpox vaccines were responsible for eradicating smallpox from the world. This is not so, for the simple reason that mass vaccination programs did not take place in many areas. In some third world countries 10% or less of the populations were immunized against smallpox due to financial and other limitations.

A couple more quotes from the same site.  Check out the site for references and lots more information.

However, vaccine proponents would have us believe that vaccines have been largely responsible for controlling virtually all of the former epidemics of killer diseases in the U.S.A. With the exceptions cited above, the facts do not bear this out.

According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, from 1911 to 1935 the four leading causes of childhood deaths from infectious diseases in the U.S.A. were diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), scarlet fever, and measles. However, by 1945 the combined death rates from these causes had declined by 95% before the implementation of mass vaccine programs. Other statistical information provided much the same pattern. According to a report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, July 30, 1999, improvements in sanitation, water quality, hygiene, and the introduction of antibiotics have been the most important factors in control of infectious diseases in the past century. Although vaccines were mentioned, they were not included among the major factors.

An example of this process is provided in the text, Vaccination, l00 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault on the Immune System, by Vera Scheibner, Ph.D., in which the author reviews the Swedish experience with whooping cough (pertussis) and the pertussis vaccine. In 1979 Sweden banned the pertussis vaccine because of a return of the disease in fully vaccinated children and also because of side effects which they considered unacceptable, including brain damage. In spite of this ban, which remains in effect today, the infant mortality in Sweden from pertussis is no greater than in fully vaccinated populations.

Another interesting thing to note is that once a child is vaccinated, doctors stop looking for that disease as a cause of illness.  This results in diseases potentially being misdiagnosed as something that there is no vaccine for.  It’s impossible to know for sure how often this happens, but it is definitely something to take into account when considering the number of cases of the diseases before and after the introduction of a new vaccine.

Even despite all this, there is still the niggling worry.  While I was doing research, someone on a forum I was on (I don’t know who, but whoever they are I’m very grateful) gave me some very sound advice.  She told me to start with the diseases.  After all, we’re vaccinating our child to protect them, right?  So if it turns out that there’s no need to protect them, it should make the decision pretty easy.  I’ll elaborate on my findings and thoughts on this sometime in the future.

Part 2 – Diagnosing VPDs

Related posts:

1. Diagnosing VPDs
2. Animal Vaccinations

For today though, here are some links and articles about vaccines in animals.  Most people don’t realize that the reason we are supposed to vaccinate animals yearly is because that is the longest any official tests to determine whether they are still working have been done.  It doesn’t mean that after a year the vaccine has stopped working or is losing efficacy, it means we don’t know how much longer than a year they will continue to work.  Many studies have been done which show that vaccines last a lot longer than that, some say the animal’s whole life.

Truth About Vaccines Yahoo group -a group for pet owners but they discuss vaccines in children at times too

Some articles/studies:

Annual Dog Vaccines May Be Unnecessary

Once a year, Ronald Schultz checks the antibody levels in his dogs’ blood. Why? He says for proof that most annual vaccines are unnecessary.

Schultz, professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, has been studying the effectiveness of canine vaccines since the 1970s; he’s learned that immunity can last as long as a dog’s lifetime, which suggests that our “best friends” are being overvaccinated.

Based on his findings, a community of canine vaccine experts has developed new veterinary recommendations that could eliminate a dog’s need for annual shots.

Vaccinations in Veterinary Medicine

Summary: Yearly “boosters” are unnecessary, provide no benefit if given (will not increase immunity). Thus boosters are either a legal issue (Rabies) or a manipulation issue (inducing clients to come in for examination rather than directly suggesting an examination).

Vaccinations: A Word of Caution for our Animals – Part I and Part II

A practice that was started many years ago and that lacks scientific validity or verification is annual revaccination. Almost without exception there is no immunologic requirement for annual revaccination. Immunity to viruses persists for years or for the life of the animal…… Furthermore, revaccination with most viral vaccines fails to stimulate an anamnestic (secondary) response…. The practice of annual vaccination in our opinion should be considered of questionable efficacy…

Heartworm: A Realistic Look – This is about heartworm, not vaccines, but is along the same lines. I find this interesting because of all the different factors that have to be just right for an animal to even contract heartworm in the first place.

Heartworm is of concern to all dog owners, and is a potentially serious, sometimes even fatal, disease. It is not, however, the unavoidable scourge that many vets and pharmaceutical companies would have us believe. If your dog is reasonably healthy, eating a SARF diet, is vaccine free, is not currently on any HW “preventives” or chemical flea and tick preventives, his immune system should be strong enough to fight off a heartworm infestation with none of the larvae reaching adulthood. In the event that some of the larvae should manage to get past your dog’s immune system defenses and survive to adulthood, it is still far from a death sentence. They will be much weakened, and the truly healthy dog will make a less hospitable host. Even at the adult stage, a healthy dog, possibly with some veterinary assistance, should be able to fight them off with no lasting ill effects to his health. Nor are the currently available cures more dangerous than the “preventive,” as the veterinary and pharmaceutical industries would have us believe.

Related posts:

1. How my dog getting sick changed the way we all ate
2. Diagnosing VPDs
3. Padding the Pockets of Big Pharma…