The Case Against Immunizations

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The Case Against Immunizations

- R. Moskowitz, MD, Homeopath

http://www.vaclib.org/basic/caseagainst.htm

 

See http://members.aol.com/doctorrmosk/articles/immunizations_1.html for the

orignial of a six part article. All six parts follow:

 

From Journal of the AIH, March 1983; included in R. Mendelsohn, ed., Dissent

in Medicine, Contemporary Books, Chicago, 1985

 

The Case Against Immunizatons By Richard Moskowitz, M. D. For the past ten

years or so I have felt a deep and growing compunction against giving routine

immunizations to children. It began with the fundamental belief that people have

the right to make that choice for themselves. Soon I found I could no longer

bring myself to give the injections even when the parents asked me to.

 

" The attempt to eradicate entire microbial species from the biosphere must

inevitably upset the balance of Nature in fundamental ways that we can barely

imagine. Such concerns loom ever larger as new vaccines continue to be developed

for no better reason than that we have the technical capacity to make them,

and to manipulate the evolutionary process itself. "

 

At bottom, I have always felt that the attempt to eradicate entire microbial

species from the biosphere must inevitably upset the balance of Nature in

fundamental ways that we can barely imagine. Such concerns loom ever larger as

new

vaccines continue to be developed for no better reason than that we have the

technical capacity to make them, thus demonstrating our right and power as a

civilization to manipulate the evolutionary process itself.

 

Purely from the viewpoint of our own species, even if we could be sure that

the vaccines were harmless, the fact remains that they are compulsory, that all

children are required to undergo them regardless of individual

susceptibility, to say nothing of the wishes of the parents or the children

themselves.

 

Most people can readily accept the fact that at times certain laws are

necessary for the public good that some of us strongly disagree with, but the

issue

in this case involves the wholesale introduction of foreign proteins or even

live viruses into the bloodstream of entire populations. For that reason alone,

the public is surely entitled to convincing proof, beyond any reasonable

doubt, that artificial immunization is in fact a safe and effective procedure in

no way injurious to health, and that the threat of the corresponding natural

disease remains sufficiently clear and urgent to warrant vaccinating everyone,

even against their will if necessary.

 

Unfortunately, convincing proof of safety and efficacy has never been given;

and, even if it could be, continuing to employ vaccines [against diseases]

that are no longer prevalent or no longer dangerous hardly qualifies as an

emergency. Finally, even if such an emergency did exist and artificial

immunization

could be shown to be an appropriate response to it, the decision to vaccinate

would remain essentially a political one, involving issues of public health

and safety that are far too important to be settled by any purely scientific or

technical criteria, or indeed by any criteria less authoritative than the

clearly articulated sense of the community that is about to be subjected to it.

 

For all of these reasons, I want to present the case against routine

immunization as clearly and forcefully as I can. What I have to say is as yet

not

quite a formal theory capable of rigorous proof or disproof, but simply an

attempt

to explain my own experience, a nexus of interrelated facts, observations,

reflections, and hypotheses that are more or less coherent and, taken together,

make intuitive sense to me. I offer them to the public because the growing

refusal of parents to vaccinate their children is seldom articulated or taken

seriously. The truth is that we have been taught to accept vaccination as a kind

of sacrament of our loyal participation in the unrestricted growth of

scientific and industrial technology, utterly heedless of the long-term

consequences

to the health of our own species, let alone to the balance of Nature as a

whole. For that reason alone, the other side of the case urgently needs to be

heard.

 

Are the Vaccines Effective? There is widespread agreement that the time

period since the common vaccines were introduced has seen a remarkable decline

in

the incidence and severity of the natural diseases corresponding to them. But

the facile assumption that the decline is also attributable to them remains

unproven, and continues to be questioned by eminent authorities in the field.

With whooping cough, for instance, both the incidence and severity had already

begun to decline precipitously long before the vaccine was introduced, [note 1]

a fact which led the epidemiologist C. C. Dauer to remark, as far back as

1943:

 

If mortality [from pertussis] continues to decline at the same rate during

the next fifteen years [as in the last fifteen], it will be extremely difficult

to show statistically that [pertussis vaccination] had any effect in reducing

mortality from whooping cough. [note 2] Much the same is true not only of

diphtheria and tetanus. but of TB, cholera, typhoid, and other common scourges

of

a bygone era, which negan to disappear rapidly at the end of the nineteenth

century, doubtless partly in response to improvements in sanitation and public

health, but in any case long before antibiotics, vaccines, or any specific

medical initiatives to combat them. [note 3] Similar reflections prompted the

celebrated microbiologist René Dubos to observe that microbial diseases have

their

own natural history, with or without drugs and vaccines, in which symbiosis

and asymptomatic infections are far more common than overt disease:

 

It is barely recognized but nevertheless true that animals and plants as well

as men can live peacefully with their most notorious enemies. The world is

obsessed by the fact that poliomyelitis can kill or maim several thousand

unfortunate victims every year. But more extraordinary is the fact that millions

upon millions of young people become infected by polio viruses yet suffer no

harm

from the infection. The dramatic episodes of conflict between men and

microbes are what strike the mind. What is less readily apprehended is the more

common fact that infection can occur without producing disease. [note 4] The

principal evidence that the vaccines are effective dates from the more recent

period, during which the dreaded polio epidemics of the 1940's and 1950's have

never

reappeared in the developed countries, and measles, mumps, and rubella, which

even a generation ago were among the commonest diseases of childhood, have

become far less prevalent in their classic acute forms since the MMR vaccine was

introduced into common use.

 

But how the vaccines have accomplished these changes is not nearly as well

understood as most people assume it is. The disturbing possibility that they act

in some other way than by producing a genuine immunity is suggested by the

fact that the diseases in question have continued to break even in highly

vaccinated populations, and that in such cases the observed differences in

incidence

and severity have often been far less dramatic than expected, and in some

cases not measurably significant at all.

 

In a recent British outbreak of whooping cough, for example, even fully

vaccinated children contracted the disease in substantial numbers, and the rate

of

serious or fatal complications was reduced only slightly. [note 5] In another

pertussis outbreak, 46 of the 85 fully vaccinated kids studied eventually came

down with the disease. [note 6] In 1977, 34 cases of measles were reported on

the campus of UCLA in a student population that was 91% " immune, " according

to careful serological testing. [note 7] In Pecos, New Mexico, during a period

of a few months in 1981, 15 out of 20 reported cases of measles had been

vaccinated, some of them quite recently. [note 8] A recent survey of

sixth-graders

in a fully-vaccinated urban community demonstrated that about 15% of this age

group are still susceptible to rubella, a figure essentially identical with

that of the pre-vaccine era. [note 9] Finallly, although the yearly incidence of

measles in the U. S. has fallen sharply from about 400,000 cases in the early

1960's to about 30,000 cases by 1974-76, the death rate remained exactly the

same; [note 10] and, with the peak incidence now in adolescents and young

adults, the risk of pneumonia and liver enzyme abnormalities has risen to 3% and

20%, respectively. [note 11]

 

The usual way to explain these discrepancies is simply to concede that

vaccines confer only partial or temporary immunity, which sounds reasonable

enough,

since they consist either of live viruses rendered less virulent by serial

passage in tissue culture, or bacteria or bacterial proteins that have been

killed or denatured by heat, such that they can still elicit an antibody

response

but no longer initiate the full-blown acute disease. Because the vaccine is

therefore a " trick, " simulating the true or natural immune response developed in

the course of the actual disease, it is certainly plausible to expect that

such artificial immunity will tend to wear off rather easily, and perhaps even

require additional booster doses at intervals throughout life to maintain

optimal effectiveness.

 

But such an explanation would itself be disturbing enough for most people.

Indeed, the basic fallacy inherent in it is painfully evident in the fact that

there is no way to predict how long this partial or temporary immunity will

last in any given individual, or how often it will need to be restimulated,

because the answers to these questions clearly depend on the same mysterious

variables that would have determined whether and how severely the same person,

unvaccinated, would have contracted the disease in the first place.

 

In any case, a number of other observations argue just as strongly that this

explanation cannot be the correct one. First, it has been clearly shown that

when children vaccinated against the measles again become susceptible to it,

booster doses have little or no effect. [note 12] Moreover, in addition to

producing pale or mild copies of the natural disease, nearly all vaccines also

produce a variety of symptoms and ailments of their own, some of them more

serious, involving deeper structures, more vital organs, showing less tendency

to

resolve spontaneously, and often more difficult to recognize as well.

 

" The vaccine-related ailments we are aware of represent only a small part of

the problem, and many others will be identified once we look for them. But

even these few make it less and less plausible to suppose that vaccines produce

a

natural or healthy immunity that lasts for some time but then wears off,

leaving patients unharmed and unaffected by the experience. "

 

Thus in a recent outbreak of the mumps in supposedly immune schoolchildren,

several patients developed unusual symptoms such as vomiting, anorexia, and

erythematous rashes without parotid involvement, and the diagnosis required

extensive serological testing to exclude other diseases. [note 13] The syndrome

known as " atypical measles " is just as vague and covers a sufficiently broad

spectrum to be easily confused with other infections or missed altogether, [note

14] even when it is thought of, and even though the illness may be considerably

worse than the wild type, with severe pain, pneumonia, clotting defects, and

generalized edema. [note 15] Indeed, I have the sense that the vaccine-related

ailments we are presently aware of represent only a very small part of the

problem, and that many others will be identified once we take the trouble to

look for them. But even the few that have been described make it less and less

plausible to suppose that vaccines produce a natural or healthy immunity that

lasts for some time but then " wears off, " leaving patients miraculously unharmed

and unaffected by the experience.

 

Personal Experiences with Vaccine-Related Illness I would like to present a

few vaccine-related cases, in part to show how varied, chronic, and difficult

to trace they can be, but also to begin to address the crucial question that is

so rarely asked, namely, how the vaccines actually work, and what effects

they actually produce inside the human body.

 

In January of 1977, I saw an 8-month-old girl for recurrent fever of unknown

origin, shortly after her third episode. These were brief but intense, lasting

48 hours at most, but usually reaching 105°F. During one episode she was

hospitalized for tests, but her pediatrician found nothing out of the ordinary,

and otherwise the child appeared to be quite well and growing and developing

normally. The only peculiar thing I could learn from the mother was that all

three episodes had occurred almost exactly one month apart, and, on consulting

her

calendar, that the first one had come just one month after the third and last

of her DPT injections, which had also been given at monthly intervals. With

the help of these calculations, the mother then also remembered that the child

had had equally high fevers within hours of each shot, but the doctor had

ignored them as common reactions to the vaccine. On the slender thread of that

history with nothing else to go on, I gave the girl a single oral dose of

homeopathically diluted DPT vaccine, and she never had another episode and has

remained well since. This case illustrates how homeopathic remedies prepared

from

vaccines can be used not only to treat but also to confirm the diagnosis of

vaccine-related illnesses, which, even when strongly suspected, might otherwise

be

very difficult to substantiate. Secondly, because fever is indeed the

commonest known complication of the DPT vaccine and the child remained quite

well in

between the attacks, her response appeared to be a relatively healthy and

vigorous one, disturbing in its recurrence, but quite simple to cure. Indeed, it

mainly prompted me to wonder how the vaccine acts in those tens and hundreds of

millions of children who show no obvious response to it at all.

 

Since then I have seen quite a few other cases of children with recurrent

fevers of unknown origin associated with a variety of chronic complaints such as

irritability, tantrums, and increased susceptibility to tonsillitis,

sinusitis, and ear infections that were similarly traceable to the pertussis

vaccine

and successfully treated with the homeopathic DPT nosode.

 

In June of 1978, a 9-month-old girl was brought in with a fever of 105°F. and

very few other symptoms. Like the first case, this child had had two such

episodes in the past, but at irregular intervals. Already somewhat ambivalent

about giving her any vaccines at all, the parents had belatedly consented to the

first DPT, but no more, since the first episode had occurred roughly two weeks

afterward. In spite of the usual acute fever remedies and other supportive

measures, the temperature held at 104-105° for 48 hours, so I decided to

investigate further. The only notable finding was an extremely high white-cell

count

of 32,000 per cu.mm., of which 25% were neutrophils, many with toxic

granulations,43% lymphocytes, 11% monocytes, and 21% young and immature forms.

Knowing

nothing else about the child, a pediatrician friend to whom I showed the slide

immediately recognized it as pertussis. As before, I gave a single oral dose

of the homeopathic DPT nosode, and the fever came down abruptly within an hour

or so, and the child has remained well since. This case was disturbing mainly

because of the high white count, which was nearing the leukemia range, the

abnormal blood picture, and the absence of any cough or respiratory symptoms,

which again suggest that introducing the vaccine directly into the blood may in

fact promote deeper, more systemic pathology than allowing the pertussis

organism to set up typical symptoms of local inflammation at the normal portal

of

entry.

 

In August of 1978, one of my teachers, a GP of over 40 years'experience,

invited me to see one of his patients, a 5-year-old boywith chronic lymphocytic

leukemia, which had first appeared soonafter a DPT vaccination. Though he had

treated the child successfully with homeopathic remedies on two previous

occasions, with shrinkage of the liver and spleen back almost to normal size and

a

dramatic improvement in the blood picture, full relapse had occurred both times

within a week or two of each successive booster. That vaccines might somehow

be implicated in childhood leukemia was an idea shocking enough in itself, but

it also completed the line of reasoning opened up by the previous cases. For

leukemia is precisely a cancerous process of the blood and blood-forming organs

(liver, spleen, lymph nodes, bone marrow), which are also the principal sites

of the immune system. Insofar as the vaccines are able to produce serious

effects at all, the blood and the major immune organs are certainly the logical

place to begin looking for them.

 

But perhaps even more shocking to me was the fact that the boy's own parents

were so reluctant to make the connection, even when it was staring them in the

face and literally threatening their son's life. It was this case that

convinced me once and for all of the need for serious discussion of

vaccine-related

illness, since rigorous experimental proof of these matters will require years

of painstaking investigation and a high level of public commitment to back it

up that so far has not been made.

 

more...............