Part 2 Childhood Vaccinations: Questions Every Parent Should Ask
Every so often we like to invite guest authors to contribute articles on certain topics. We are very pleased to have Marc Weissman, D.C., as our guest author for the next few weeks. Dr. Weissman will be writing a five-part series on the highly controversial and critically important topic of childhood vaccinations. Dr. Weissman has been studying this issue for sometime. He has extensively examined literature on the subject and has presented his work in an educational seminar. Dr. Weissman was awarded the Doctor of Chiropractic degree, magna cum laude, from Life University in 1998. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Chemistry from the State University of New York, College at Oneonta. He is Board Certified to practice Chiropractic as well as physiologic therapeutics. He is also a certified member of the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association. Dr. Weissman has attended numerous seminars in the field of chiropractic technique and annually attends post-graduate courses to stay current on the latest diagnostic and treatment procedures. Additionally, he has taught seminars to Chiropractic students preparing for the National Board. His clinical emphasis is on increasing the overall quality of life for adults as well as children through gentle chiropractic adjustments. Dr. Weissman is the owner and president of Mercado Chiropractic in Scottsdale, Arizona. The information contained within Dr. Weissman’s blog can be purchased from Koren Publications. Please visit http://www.korenpublications.com/ for more information.
In this next part of my 5 part series on vaccines I am going to probe a little deeper into this miasma of uncertainty surrounding vaccines. Once again this is a complicated issue surrounded by fear and is emotionally charged. I do not present this information as a hardcore anti-vaccine campaign. I present this information as a way for the public to be educated about a part of the vaccine controversy that we are not told about.
One of the most common questions that I receive from parents has to do with the “What if?”. They usually will present something like, “Dr. Weissman, what if we don’t vaccinate our baby and something bad happens?” When a parent asks me this what I truly think they mean is “Do the benefits of vaccine outweigh the risks?”
This is the most important question we can ask. The justification for vaccination, in spite of all the damage it is known to cause, is that the damage is miniscule: “one in a million.” Whenever vaccination criticism surfaces, the media will interview some health department official or MD who will repeat the mantra: ‘Sure vaccines have some slight chance of causing damage, but (repeat after me) the benefits far outweigh the risks.’ The only problem with that statement is that it has never been proven.
No one knows what the chances are that your child may be hurt or killed by a vaccine. Why?
In order to do a risk/benefit analysis, we need to know how many children are being hurt. We do not know that because doctors and health officials rarely report vaccine injuries.
Even though by law MDs must report vaccine injuries to the government’s vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS), only one in ten vaccine-injured children is ever reported according to the FDA. This government statistic may be conservative, the actual amount of underreporting may be far greater. Kessler D. JAMA, 1993; 269 (No.21): 2785. Only about 1% of serious events are reported to the FDA.
The following quote comes from a book called “DPT, A Shot in the Dark”, it explains perfectly how there is an under reporting in the system:
“Janet asked the coroner why he could not state point-blank that Richie’s death was due to a DPT shot reaction, when it was obvious…He said he couldn’t write down on the death certificate that Richie had died from a DPT reaction because ‘the state’s standing on immunizations would be in an uproar.”
At an Institute of Medicine conference in Washington, DC. a representative of Connaught labs said this:
“The company estimates about a 50-fold underreporting of adverse events in the passive reporting system.”
-Froeschle, J. Connaught Laboratories. Adverse events associated with childhood vaccines, evidence bearing on causality. Washington DC: Institute of Medicine presentations. 5/11/92; 328 Appendix B.
Japanese research indicates that adverse reactions to MMR vaccine are 78 times as frequent as the UK’s Chief Medical Officer of Health has admitted. If those figures are correct, then the vaccine is more dangerous than the illness.”
- Richard Barr, Alexander Harris, Mumps, Measles and Rubella (MMR) Vaccines and Measles Rubella (MR) Dawbars (UK) 1997
An analysis of the CDC’s own data demonstrates that the number of actual injuries from the rotavirus vaccine is 500 times the injuries reported to VAERS. One in 500!!! And even with all this underreporting the rotavirus vaccine was so dangerous it was pulled from the market. Children were hospitalized and even died. How many children were really hurt or killed? We may never know.The next piece of information that I have to share with you is an actual quote from a report filed to VAERS:
“Approx two weeks post measles vaccination, patient experienced acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis, deteriorated rapidly and died. The cause of death was encephalomyelitis. An autopsy was performed, but the brain was liquefied.”
- VaersIDReportText134548
In the early 1980s pharmaceutical companies were settling so many lawsuits (out of court – records sealed) from vaccine-injured children and their families that they threatened Congress that if they didn’t have protection from liability they were going to stop making vaccines. Congress then passed laws protecting the vaccine companies from liability and created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Extra fees were added to each vaccine to pay the damages for vaccine-injured children. Over a billion dollars has been paid, even though most parents do not know this system exists and most requests are rejected by Justice Department lawyers. Further, the government only compensates for a limited number of severe injuries and only if they’ve occurred a few hours after a shot. It is a very bad, broken system and its reform is being discussed in Congress and fought by the vaccine lobby.
One of the most powerful (and frightening) statements ever made regarding vaccination is this one by Dr. Coulter:
“The symptoms manifested with pathological intensity in a small group will of necessity appear in milder form in a much larger proportion of the population. For every ‘autistic’ who is shut away in an institution there will be a thousand alienated individuals functioning as normal taxpaying citizens.”
- Coulter, HL. Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality: The Medical Assault on the American Brain. Washington, DC: Center for Empirical Medicine. 1990; 37.
It is impossible to biologically stress a population and have an all-or-nothing response, i.e. mild or no reaction or severe reaction and death. Rather, the damage (in this case vaccine damage) will take a bell curve approach, that is, some people will be mildly hurt, and some severely hurt or killed but the vast majority of those damaged will fall somewhere in the middle between those two extremes. They may be the ones with chronic illness, slight IQ loss that isn’t considered a problem, but they aren’t as intelligent, or able to connect. They may be emotionally distant, with just a mild form of damage. This may become the majority of Americans. Not quite right, but not bad enough to be hospitalized or institutionalized – our new definition of normal!
I started out this section asking if the benefit outweighs the risk. The scary fact is that we simply just don’t know! The system that we use to determine this is so ineffective and broken no one can say with the data that we have that the benefit outweighs the risk.
In my next posting, I will be discussing the effectiveness of vaccines. Thank you for taking the time to educate yourself. If you have any questions, comments or have any input, please feel free to visit my website at www.mercadochiropractic.com and send me an email.
Marc Weissman, D.C.
Mercado Chiropractic
10135 E. Via Linda
Suite 115Scottsdale, AZ 85258
(480) 661-7000
