By Dr. Mercola
Recently published research in the New England Journal of Medicine1 investigated the reasons behind, and potential solutions, for mumps outbreaks reported to the CDC during the past several years. According to the authors, widespread use of the MMR vaccine had reduced the annual incidence of mumps in the US by more than 99 percent by 2005.
But then, suddenly, something changed.
In 2006, a large outbreak was reported among highly vaccinated populations in the US, and two additional outbreaks occurred during 2009 and 2010. The latter two occurred in American Orthodox Jewish communities in and around New York City.
In 2009, more than 3,500 people got sick, and the overwhelming majority of them – 89 percent – were children, who had received the CDC recommended two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. Another eight percent had received one dose, putting the total numbers of students vaccinated at 97 percent!
Matters were much the same for the 2010 outbreak. Of the more than 1,000 people who contracted mumps that year, 77 percent had received two doses of the MMR.
Vaccinated Population Contracting and Spreading Disease
Virtually every outbreak of infectious disease in the U.S. for which there is a vaccine has been blamed on unvaccinated children – at least initially – but lately we've repeatedly seen that reported outbreaks of diseases like pertussis, influenza and mumps are occurring within the fully vaccinated population, even though the vaccine is supposed to prevent the disease in question.
This pattern is now so obvious that researchers have no choice but to try to address the discrepancy and come up with an explanation because, clearly, vaccinated people are contracting and facilitating the transmission of infectious diseases in much greater numbers than public health officials and doctors have been willing to admit.
The ludicrous explanation public health officials have come up with to try to explain the school-based mumps outbreak among fully vaccinated children is based on a theory that close and extended contact between the vaccinated children "bombarded students with large amounts of the virus" and allowed the mumps virus to "overwhelm the vaccine."
As reported by NPR:2
"Public health officials... say it was the unique style of study in yeshivas, religious schools for Orthodox Jews. In a yeshiva, students are paired up in partnerships called chavrusas. The two students in a chavrusa share the same desk and the same book and engage in a vigorous dialogue about the day's lesson. Throughout the school day, which lasts up to 15 hours in a yeshiva, the students rotate among different chavrusas, changing their study partner each time.
Albert Barskey, an epidemiologist with the CDC who worked to contain the outbreak, says the chavrusa style of studying probably exacerbated the spread of mumps. The mumps virus gets around on respiratory droplets, saliva and other bodily fluids. 'Because of the close prolonged contact, uninfected students were probably bombarded with large amounts of the virus from the infected students, and the virus overwhelmed the vaccine,' Barsky [says]."
Dr. Kenneth Bromberg, chairman of pediatrics and director of the Vaccine Study Center at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York City told US News:3
"These outbreaks are similar to what we saw on college campuses where you have crowding. Vaccines are safe and effective, but the protective effect of a vaccine can be overcome in the right situation."
Their answer to the problem?
Just add another booster shot! As a test, a third dose of MMR vaccine was administered to children in three schools in an effort to stem the outbreak. According to follow-up results, recently published in the journal Vaccine,4 the third dose appeared to be well tolerated, with just over seven percent of the students reporting at least one local or systemic adverse event in the two weeks following vaccination. The long-term effects of a third MMR shot is, naturally, completely unknown.
Essentially, the thinking is that if two shots are useless, maybe a third equally useless shot will fix the equation and amount to some kind of protection. Surely I cannot be the only one who questions the intelligence of this?
Especially considering the fact that Merck was recently sued for covering up the ineffectiveness of the mumps portion of the MMR vaccine, costing the US government millions of dollars in wasted funds over the past decade, and exposing children to unnecessary risks from the vaccine for very limited benefit. An antitrust class action lawsuit was also filed shortly thereafter, alleging Merck went to great lengths to manipulate test procedures and falsify results to prop up fraudulent efficacy claims, thereby maintaining its monopoly on the MMR vaccine market in the US.
And now we're supposed to just shrug our shoulders and say "okay" to children getting yet another MMR booster shot? Granted, it hasn't become a CDC recommendation yet, but based on past actions of public health officials covering up vaccine ineffectiveness and drug companies seeking expanded vaccine markets, I wouldn't be at all surprised if another MMR booster was added to the vaccination schedule without adequate testing to prove safety and effectiveness.
Natural Versus Artificial Immunity
Vaccines are never 100 percent protective, and the reason for this is because they provide only artificial, temporary, typically inferior immunity compared to that your body would obtain from naturally contracting and recovering from an infection.
According to the CDC, the MMR vaccine is estimated to be somewhere between 76-95 percent effective (or at least it was, prior to the lawsuit accusing Merck of falsifying their studies to hide declining efficacy rates). The second MMR dose was added to the CDC recommended child vaccination schedule because up to 20 percent of individuals do not develop even temporary protection after the first dose. The second dose is intended to provide a "second chance" for the vaccine to work, which is further evidence of this shot's ineffectiveness.
And who knows, we may potentially be looking at yet another booster shot being added to the vaccination schedule. But is adding booster shots really the best answer to address poor vaccine effectiveness?
In the case of mumps, immunity is typically permanent for those who get it in childhood. Like many of the childhood diseases we're now vaccinating our children against, mumps is not a serious disease for the vast majority of children. I think it's worth considering that, while the disease can in rare cases lead to complications, including inflammation of the brain, testicles and ovaries or deafness, vaccines as well carry serious health risks that can be greater for some than others..
The MMR vaccine can cause acute brain inflammation and encephalopathy (permanent brain dysfunction), which has been acknowledged by the U.S. Court of Claims in the awarding of federal compensation to MMR vaccine injured children. Recently, the Italian health ministry reignited the debate over the safety of the MMR vaccine when it conceded that the MMR vaccine caused autism in a now nine-year-old boy, who suffered brain inflammation and permanent brain damage after he was vaccinated.
There are no guarantees either way. Your child could be that rare instance where the disease causes serious complications, or your child could become another statistic of vaccine damage.
However, children, who contract and recover from mumps during childhood, are afforded robust, long lasting protection. Not so with the vaccine. Even after taking the health risks associated with each and every dose of the vaccine, your child still might contract mumps, and then face the same risks for complications from the disease as they would have otherwise. This is one reason why potential risks and benefits must be carefully weighed...
Is the Current Vaccine Program Causing More Harm than Good?
Whether you're dealing with drugs or natural nutrients, there's usually a point at which "more" becomes detrimental. And I believe that in the US, we've reached that point with our vaccination schedule. American children are the most vaccinated children in the world, yet they're among the sickest. For example, over the last 30 years, the number of American kids with learning disabilities, ADHD, asthma, and diabetes has more than tripled. Meanwhile, the number of vaccinations the CDC tells doctors to give to babies and children under the age of six has also tripled in the last 30 years. Many of the 69 doses of 16 vaccines currently recommended by federal health officials are now mandated by state health officials for children to attend daycare and school.
Sadly, extreme pressures are placed on parents to vaccinate their children for every disease under the sun – yet doctors cannot guarantee the safety of vaccines or that they will even work. Many vaccinations fail to work after multiple doses have been given – as is clearly demonstrated with a large number of mumps cases detected among fully vaccinated children – and every vaccine has the potential to cause catastrophic complications (including death).
Bear in mind that vaccine safety is not just about individual vaccines.
Dr. Russell Blaylock has written an excellent paper that explains the connection between excessive vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders like autism that is definitely worth reading. In a nutshell, vaccines can over-stimulate your child's immune system and, when several vaccines are administered together or in close succession, their interaction may completely overwhelm your child's immune system. This situation is FAR worse than that of a virus overwhelming the vaccine, as suggested in the featured study, as your immune system is the primary defense against ALL disease, from the simple cold to autoimmune disorders to cancer.
Once you overburden your child's immune system with too many vaccines, their health may be sorely compromised for life. As explained by Barbara Loe Fisher, president and co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center:
"Vaccines are supposed to fool your body's immune system into producing antibodies to resist viral and bacterial infection in the same way that actually having the disease usually produces immunity to future infection. But vaccines atypically introduce into the human body lab altered live viruses and killed bacteria along with chemicals, metals, drugs and other additives such as formaldehyde, aluminum, mercury, monosodium glutamate, sodium phosphate, phenoxyethanol, gelatin, sulfites, yeast protein, antibiotics as well as unknown amounts of RNA and DNA from animal and human cell tissue cultures.
Whereas natural recovery from many infectious diseases stimulates lifetime immunity, vaccines only provide temporary protection and most vaccines require 'booster' doses to extend vaccine-induced artificial immunity.
The fact that manmade vaccines cannot replicate the body's natural experience with the disease is one of the key points of contention between those who insist that mankind cannot live without mass use of multiple vaccines and those who believe that mankind's biological integrity will be severely compromised by their continued use."
This knowledge leaves many open-ended questions about the vaccine process in the United States, and whether it is ultimately causing more harm than good. Barbara Loe Fisher continues:
"First, is it better to protect children against infectious disease early in life through temporary immunity from a vaccine or are they better off contracting certain contagious infections in childhood and attaining permanent immunity? Second, do vaccine complications ultimately cause more chronic illness and death than infectious diseases do? Both questions essentially pit trust in human intervention against trust in nature and the natural order, which existed long before vaccines were created by man."
Protect Your Right to Informed Consent and Vaccine Exemptions
With all the uncertainty surrounding the safety and efficacy of vaccines, it's critical to protect your right to informed consent to vaccination and fight to protect and expand vaccine exemptions in state public health laws. The best way to do this is to get personally involved with your state legislators and the leaders in your community.
THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY.
Mass vaccination policies are made at the federal level but vaccine laws are made at the state level. It is at the state level where your action to protect your vaccine choice rights can have the greatest impact. It is critical for EVERYONE to get involved now in standing up for the legal right to make vaccine choices in America because those choices are being threatened by lobbyists representing drug companies, medical trade associations and public health officials, who are trying to persuade legislators to strip all vaccine exemptions from public health laws.
Signing up for NVIC's free Advocacy Portal at www.NVICAdvocacy.org gives you immediate, easy access to your own state legislators on your Smart Phone or computer so you can make your voice heard. You will be kept up-to-date on the latest state bills threatening your vaccine choices and get practical, useful information to help you become an effective vaccine choice advocate in your own community. Also, when national vaccine issues come up, you will have the up-to-date information and call to action items you need at your fingertips..
So please, as your first step, sign up for the NVIC Advocacy Portal.
Share Your Story with the Media and People You Know
If you or a family member has suffered a serious vaccine reaction, injury or death, please talk about it. If we don't share information and experiences with each other, everybody feels alone and afraid to speak up. Write a letter to the editor if you have a different perspective on a vaccine story that appears in your local newspaper. Make a call in to a radio talk show that is only presenting one side of the vaccine story.
I must be frank with you; you have to be brave because you might be strongly criticized for daring to talk about the "other side" of the vaccine story. Be prepared for it and have the courage to not back down. Only by sharing our perspective and what we know to be true about vaccination will the public conversation about vaccination open up so people are not afraid to talk about it.
We cannot allow the drug companies and medical trade associations funded by drug companies or public health officials promoting forced use of a growing list of vaccines to dominate the conversation about vaccination. The vaccine injured cannot be swept under the carpet and treated like nothing more than "statistically acceptable collateral damage" of national one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination policies that put way too many people at risk for injury and death. We shouldn't be treating people like guinea pigs instead of human beings.
Internet Resources Where You Can Learn More
I encourage you to visit the following web pages on the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) website at www.NVIC.org:
- NVIC Memorial for Vaccine Victims: View descriptions and photos of children and adults, who have suffered vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths. If you or your child experiences an adverse vaccine event, please consider posting and sharing your story here.
- If You Vaccinate, Ask 8 Questions: Learn how to recognize vaccine reaction symptoms and prevent vaccine injuries.
- Vaccine Freedom Wall: View or post descriptions of harassment and sanctions by doctors, employers, school and health officials for making independent vaccine choices.
Connect with Your Doctor or Find a New One that Will Listen and Care
If your pediatrician or doctor refuses to provide medical care to you or your child unless you agree to get vaccines you don't want, I strongly encourage you to have the courage to find another doctor. Harassment, intimidation, and refusal of medical care is becoming the modus operandi of the medical establishment in an effort to stop the change in attitude of many parents about vaccinations after they become truly educated about health and vaccination.
However, there is hope.
At least 15 percent of young doctors recently polled admit that they're starting to adopt a more individualized approach to vaccinations in direct response to the vaccine safety concerns of parents. It is good news that there is a growing number of smart young doctors, who prefer to work as partners with parents in making personalized vaccine decisions for children, including delaying vaccinations or giving children fewer vaccines on the same day or continuing to provide medical care for those families, who decline use of one or more vaccines.
So take the time to locate a doctor, who treats you with compassion and respect and is willing to work with you to do what is right for your child.