Challenging the Vaccination Dogma

by Sherri Tenpenny

A chilling pattern consistently arises from the stories of hundreds of parents:

My child was a normal, happy, and healthy. He was walking, learning to talk and playing with his siblings. He was on track developmentally, and everything was normal. At his one-year well baby check up, the doctor said it was time for his next round of shots. Unquestioning, the shots were given. Within weeks, he was autistic.
The stories may vary somewhat in content. Perhaps there was a concern about a resolving infection. (The doctor said not to worry.) Or, there was reservation because the last shots had caused hours of inconsolable crying and a high fever. (The doctor said that was “normal” for some kids and not to worry.) But the stories of the descent into the isolated world of regressive autism for thousands of children are eerily the same.

What is Dogma?

Webster’s defines dogma as “a doctrine; a positive arrogant assertion of opinion.” Taking off from this definition, medical dogmas certainly abound. Many have survived for decades simply because an assertion was made and then never questioned. Over time, the allegation was assumed to be fact.

An early example of dogma occurred within the vaccine industry. In 1913, Dr. Simon Flexnor developed a theory that polio was a disease that entered through the nose and mouth and traveled directly to the brain and the spinal cord, resulting in paralysis. Through his work with monkeys, he concluded that the virus would only grow in neurological tissue cultures. Further studies demonstrated that nearly all vaccines cultured with neurological tissue caused life-threatening encephalitis.1

Flexnor’s conclusions were never reproduced or confirmed by other researchers. No one tried experiments using different strains of poliovirus to see if they would grow on tissues other then nerve tissue. His sole paper became the unquestioned dogma that dictated the direction of polio research for 25 years until Dr. John Enders serendipitously found that, indeed, the virus would grow in various other types of tissue cultures.

When Enders’ revolutionary discovery was published in Science, January 28, 1949 , the entire virology community accepted it with little fanfare. A dogma that had been the cornerstone of polio research for more than a quarter of a century passed quietly into the history books.

Present day vaccine dogma is published by The Institute of Medicine (IOM), a group of ostensibly impartial physicians, scientists and researchers. This ivory tower organization consistently concludes, after a review of the pharmaceutically-funded research that has already concluded that no connection exists, that there is no “scientific” support for the clinically observable connection between autism and vaccination. The IOM supports the established belief that, since autism appears around the same time as the first year vaccinations are given, angry and disappointed parents are looking for something to blame. The blame is placed upon a “safe and effective” vaccine. In essence, thousands of parents are called liars.

The medical dogma supporting this position is the assertion that “temporal association does not prove causality.” Simply put, the phase means that even though two events occur at nearly the same time, one event is not the cause of the other. The implication is that regression into autism would have happened anyway. The administration of several vaccines immediately before the appearance of autism had nothing to do with it, a dogma that promotes “the child is to blame, not the vaccine.” Similarly, intense investigations are searching for a genetic cause for autism spectrum disorders.2 The identification of a corrupted gene will point an incriminating finger at defective parents as the “cause” of their child’s autism.

The following statement was published in the Center for Disease Control’s publication on infection diseases, referred to as The Pink Book:

“There is no distinct syndrome from vaccine administration, and therefore, many temporally associated adverse events probably represent background illness rather than illness caused by the vaccine….the [vaccine] may stimulate or precipitate inevitable symptoms of underlying CNS disorder, such as seizures, infantile spasms, epilepsy or SIDS. By chance alone, some of these cases will seem to be temporally related to [the vaccine].”3

With the rate of autism being one in every 166 children in the U.S and a new high of one in every 58 children in the U.K, an urgent investigation needs to be undertaken to establish if unvaccinated 12 to 18 month old children suddenly become autistic. There has been no answer to this question, in fact, no one has even looked.

Safety Assumptions

The classic example of an unquestioned dogma was the long held notion that the sun rotated around the earth. In 1530, Copernicus challenged this by asserting that the earth rotated on its axis once daily and traveled around the sun once yearly, a fantastic concept for the times and absolute heresy. For his efforts, Copernicus was imprisoned, subjected to a trial by the Inquisitioners, and finally forced to withdraw his evidence to save his own life.

The modern day equivalent is challenging the conventional mindset that vaccines are “safe and effective.” The Inquisitioners, often the family pediatricians, force parents into vaccination decisions under threat of expulsion from the medical practice. The State forces this practice by denying a public education. Vaccination is accepted unquestionably as not only effective but and necessary for keeping your child healthy. But is it the truth?

Vaccination is a medical treatment. Assumptions regarding the effectiveness of many medical treatments abound. A report published by The Government Accounting Office (GAO) concluded that “only 10-20% of all procedures currently used in medical practice have been shown to be efficacious by controlled trials. 4 Hence, 80-90% of usual and customary practices are assumed to be effective without proof. Vaccination falls into this category.

As for assumptions about safety, contrary to what has been written in government literature and in pharmaceutical industry package inserts, vaccines have never been proven to be safe by clinical trials.

In a safety study involving a medication is performed, a new drug is compared to a benign placebo such as a sugar pill. However, when a vaccine study is conducted, the new vaccine is not compared to an inert compound such as a shot of sterile water. Instead, the new vaccine is compared to another vaccine with a “known toxicity profile.” This practice began during the massive Salk trials in 1954 and has continued to the present day. If the numbers of reactions or side effects are similar between the new vaccine and the old vaccine, researchers will declare the experimental vaccine to be “as safe as a placebo.” Unfortunately, the placebo really isn’t an inert placebo, and serious side effects are deleted by a stroke of a pen. A trial involving a combination vaccine, Comvax®, illustrates these points.

Comvax is a vaccine that combines the Haemophilus influenza vaccine (HiB) and the hepatitis B vaccine into a single shot. During the safety trials, this new vaccine was compared to a “placebo” that consisted solely of the two different vaccines being administered as two separate shots. Side effects were described as follows:

During the study, 17 children (1.9%) had an event within 14 days of vaccination that met one of the defining criteria of a serious adverse experience. These experiences included seizure, asthma, diarrhea, apnea (stopped breathing) [and many others.] Virtually all of these adverse experiences were classified as serious because they involved a hospitalization. None was judged by the study investigators to be causally related [caused by] Comvax® or the [other two vaccines]. In addition, three deaths among participants in this study were attributed to sudden infant death syndrome that occurred more than 14 days after administration of a dose of vaccine (29, 31, and 38 days, respectively.) Again, none was judged by the investigators to be related to vaccination.5

The parameters of the study included documented adverse reactions that occurred within 14 days of the babies receiving the shots. Since the deaths occurred outside of this parameter, a stroke of the pen negated damaging evidence and the new vaccine was reported to be “well-tolerated and safe.”

Effective: In the Lab vs. In the Doctor’s Office

An “effective vaccine” as defined by medical doctors is a vaccine that protects a person from developing the infection that they have been vaccinated against. For example, the chickenpox vaccine is considered to be medically effective if, in the case of an outbreak, those vaccinated do not contract chickenpox.

An “effective vaccine” as defined by researchers is one that leads to the development of antibodies after it has been injected into the bloodstream. Referred to as a “positive seroconversion,” one vaccine is considered to be more effective than another if it vaccine induces a measurably greater antibody response than the second.6

These definitions are quite different and have considerably different ramifications. The presence of an antibody does not necessarily confer protection from infection. It is known that, in many instances, antigen-specific antibody titers do not correlate with protection.7

In addition, many outbreaks have occurred in fully vaccinated populations. One of many examples was the outbreak of measles in a group that was more than 99% vaccinated.8 Therefore, when the medical community reads that a vaccine as been “proven to be effective” the perception is that it will confer protection. Effective and protective, in vaccine research are not synonymous.

Further evidence exists that antibody titers measured in the laboratory have not been proven to be clinically effective. The manufacturer of the Haemophilus influenza vaccine, the HiBTiter®, reports in its package insert that “the contribution [antibodies make] to clinical protection is unknown.”9 The CDC has stated the following about the pertussis vaccine: “The findings of efficacy studies have not demonstrated a direct correlation between antibody response and protection against pertussis disease”10 meaning that the presence of an antibody is not a guarantee of protection from contracting the infection.

The dogma that “vaccines are safe and effective” has become medicine’s sacred cow. Within the medical community, it is considered irrational and nearly heresy to question the importance of vaccines. Parents who have experienced the wrath of pediatricians when the doctor’s mandates have been challenged are seeking information independently. After reading horror stories of vaccine injury, or worse, have experienced first-hand accounts of watching their child regress into autism, are deciding for themselves to not adhere to the vaccine dogmas preached by the medical profession.

One of the primary benchmarks of public health policy in a civilized society is the absence of infectious diseases. This doctrine emerged from the pre-antibiotic era, when thousands of people died annually across the globe from infections introduced through poor hygiene. We are long past that phase in the evolution in our society. Our concept of public health must become more than the myopic focus on high vaccination rates and low infection rates.

The dogma “vaccines are safe and effective” must be replaced with the truth: Vaccines can harm and are cannot be proven to be medically effective. It is time to dispense with this dogma before one more child becomes a medical statistic.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/


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