Vaccination Myths – busting the mainstream beliefs
Dr Rachael Dunlop is Vice President of the Australian Skeptics and one of the lead movers and shakers behind the Stop the AVN organisation. This group was set up with the specific goal of forcing our community-based vaccine-safety organisation to close. They deny that we have the right of freedom of speech in Australia, claiming that those who question the safety and effectiveness of vaccines are a danger to society and as such, they must be stopped. As part of her campaign to ‘expose’ the myths discussed by those who question vaccination, she recently posted an article on the mamamia.com.au blog entitled, 9 vaccination myths busted. With science! I would like to take this opportunity to critique the science behind the claims made by Dr Dunlop in the interests of encouraging an open and honest scientific debate about this issue which is the whole reason for being of the AVN. Since it will take a bit of time to go through all of Dunlop’s claims, I expect that this blog response will run over several days. Dr Google and the brainless public In her introduction, Dr Rachie (as she likes to refer to herself), bemoans the fact that, “A recent survey found more than two thirds of us research our medications on-line and half of us turn to “Dr Google” for diagnosis.” She seems to feel that this is a bad thing because, “60% of the results will not only be misleading but downright scary.” My issue with this attitude stems from a common belief amongst medical professionals that people without medical degrees are not capable of understanding medical information and therefore, they should just listen to doctors – the real experts when it comes to medical decisions – and not question anything they are told. My fervent belief, after almost 20 years of speaking with parents who question vaccination, is that the vast majority of them only started questioning because of the following:
1- They saw their own child become sick, regress or die within a short time of a vaccine (and you try telling these parents that correlation doesn’t equal causality when they have seen the evidence in their own family!). 2- They have a close family member who was sickened or killed by a vaccine. 3- Their own education at school (medical school, nursing school, chiropractic college, etc. led them to look further into this issue) 4- They are interested in natural health and wanted to make informed decisions about every issue surrounding their children’s health including full disclosure of the ingredients and side effects of therapies recommended by doctors.
Despite the fact that most of these individuals are not health professionals, they all were capable of understanding the evidence surrounding the vaccination issue. They were also very good at detecting bullshit from their doctors or from the government. Though Dr Rachie seems to imply that a visit to “Dr Google” is a complete waste of time, the good online doctor provides an incredibly rich resource for obtaining medical journal articles, manufacturer’s package inserts and studies on both sides of this issue. I get the distinct impression, though I could be wrong, that people like Dr Rachie long for the ‘good old days’ when much of the information about medicine was written in German, Greek or Latin as a way of keeping this knowledge secret from those who were not initiates of their mysteries. In any case, whilst Dr Rachie feels that Dr Google is not an appropriate source of information, the fact is that parents are using it and if they are frightened, that fright might stem from the more than 18,000 people each year who die from preventable medical error and adverse reactions to properly prescribed medications – a figure that certainly scares me! Wanting to be cautious after hearing about this is not a sign of being ill-informed – it is the exact opposite. In 1995, The Quality in Australian Health Care Study estimated that there were more than 12,000 Australians dying every year as a result of preventable medical error. Within a decade, that estimate rose to over 18,000. We have no idea what the figure is today because it has not been studied but according to Jeff Richardson, a professor of health economics at Monash University,
“'The issue of adverse events in the Australian health system should dominate all others. However, it would be closer to the truth to describe it as Australia's best kept secret,'' he said. Professor Richardson called for compulsory reporting and more audits of adverse events. He said doctors who did report adverse events should be immune from prosecution and only subjected to peer review, counselling and deregistration if necessary.”[1]
In the US, that figure is estimated to be as high as 1 million deaths each year (Death by Medicine, Dr Gary Null) and yet, the US government, like the government here in Australia, seems to ignore these tragedies in favour of attacking and suppressing safer, more natural, effective alternatives. Science is in the eye of the beholder Dr Rachie claims that up to 60% of the information we get on the internet is incorrect and her reference for this statement is a ‘study’ from the Journal of Health Communication referred to above. The authors of this article, published in September 2005, did web searches using several different search engines. The found that 60% of the results obtained when using various spellings of the words vaccination and immunisation were linking to web sites that were critical of vaccination or were proponents of vaccine safety whilst only 40% of the links pointed to government or medical community websites. Therefore, according to the authors of this report, 60% of the information on vaccination is misleading and incorrect. Interestingly, most of the 60% of websites which question vaccines contain a high number of articles and a large percentage of their information sourced from mainstream peer-reviewed journals. So is it true that these websites are misleading and incorrect, or is it more likely the case that simply questioning vaccination makes these sites a threat to entrenched financial interests and therefore, they must be considered in their entirety to be wrong? One such example of this attitude is the whale.to site. This web page, one of the oldest on the internet dealing with the issues of vaccination and natural health (and a broad range of other areas), was set up by a farmer in Wales (UK) who has spent an incredible amount of time gathering together information on the subject of vaccination. Much of the information on this page has come directly from mainstream journals such as the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, Paediatrics, and more. Yet when someone uses a citation from this page – even one that cites a mainstream source – it is dismissed out of hand as being just from ‘whale.to’ as if to say that it is completely discredited as a result. The same information, cited on one of the medical community’s pages, is an acceptable reference, but somehow, once it passes through a site that questions the veracity or intelligence of mainstream medicine, it is no longer an appropriate citation! The AVN says that the internet is a perfectly fit and proper place to obtain information about health and we believe that parents are capable of understanding what is good information vs what is bad. They can understand why information from vested interests may not be acceptable whilst independent sources may be more likely to be correct. And just as there would be vaccine-safety sites which contain a mix of correct and incorrect information, so too you will find that government and mainstream medical sites also have that same mix. As for the sites run or funded by the pharmaceutical companies, one would have to take what they say with more than a grain of salt since pharmaceutical corruption is a known confounder of results both within their own websites and press releases as well as in the journals they finance. Myth 1: Vaccines cause autism The first ‘myth’ that Dr Rachie deals with is the one that has probably garnered the most attention both within the media and the medical community as well as amongst health consumers. That is the question of whether vaccination is linked in any way with the development of autism. She claims that “Since 1998 there have been countless large and comprehensive studies looking for a link between vaccines and autism, but the evidence keeps coming up negative.” Strangely, she hasn’t cited any of those countless studies. Perhaps because she is well aware that the majority of them are broad population-based epidemiological studies or retrospective analyses of older studies which were never meant to look at the connection between vaccination and autism. Dr Bernardine Healy, former head of the National Institutes of Health in the US, stated that,
“…public health officials have intentionally avoided researching whether subsets of children are "susceptible" to vaccine side effects - afraid the answer will scare the public. …There is a completely expressed concern that they don't want to pursue a hypothesis because that hypothesis could be damaging to the public health community at large by scaring people. "First of all," Healy said, "I think the public's smarter than that. The public values vaccines. But more importantly, I don't think you should ever turn your back on any scientific hypothesis because you're afraid of what it might show."[2]
So what we have here is a government and a medical community who are happy to continue to claim that there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism whilst they resist doing any clinical trials to prove or disprove that theory. And whilst it is true that their studies, which were designed in such a way that any links between vaccination and autism would not show up, don’t show a link, it is also true that the studies that would determine whether or not vaccines are causally related to autism have never been done. For decades, vaccine safety proponents like the AVN have been urging the government to fund studies comparing autism in the vaccinated vs the fully unvaccinated. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) promised 10 years ago that such a study would be performed. We are still waiting. A recent study out of Germany is now being tossed about as proof positive that we have now compared the vaccinated with the unvaccinated and shown once and for all that vaccines don’t cause adverse health effects including autism. The paper is entitled, Vaccination Status and Health in Children and Adolescents[3]. In this study which is available online, a group of 13,359 vaccinated children were compared with a group of 94 unvaccinated children. It does not take a statistician to determine that if you want to be truly scientific, you need to have groups of similar sizes, otherwise, the outcomes don’t mean much (if anything). Attack the messenger to suppress the message Dr Rachie then goes on the attack against Dr Wakefield for his “Callous Disregard” of children under his care. These were the charges that Wakefield faced when he became the first scientist in recent years to publish an hypothesis which said that vaccination might be related to autism and asked that more study be done. Brian Deer is a freelance journalist for the Sunday Times – a Murdoch newspaper run by James Murdoch who coincidentally, also sits on the board of Glaxo SmithKline – a manufacturer of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. Deer was the original complainant against Wakefield to the General Medical Council, the body that eventually revoked Wakefield’s license to practice medicine as well as citing two of Wakefield’s co-authors, Simon Murch and John Walker-Smith. For those who would like to read more about the issues surrounding the attacks against these caring and ethical doctors – all in the name of pharmaceutical profits and protection of the medical status quo at the cost of our children, I highly recommend the following excellent books:
Callous Disregard – by Dr Andrew Wakefield Silenced Witnesses 1 and 2, edited by Martin J. Walker
Wakefield’s case series – not study – described the experience of 12 families whose children regressed into autism with signs of serious gut involvement following MMR vaccine. When it was first published, Wakefield called for the MMR vaccine to be split up so that parents could have the choice of whether to give their children the 3-in-1 shot which had never been properly tested for safety or the individual vaccines. Almost immediately, the UK government withdrew the license for individual measles and rubella vaccines, leading to a decline in vaccine compliance. Wakefield advised caution until the connection between the MMR and bowel and neurological symptoms could be ruled out. He never advised parents not to vaccinate and in fact, said that his own children were vaccinated but that we must be able to ensure that vaccines were as safe as possible before urging families to give them to their children. For this ‘heresy’, Wakefield and those ethical doctors who stood by the families of autistic children, were crucified by the GMC and the media. Dr Rachie refers to a Danish study which purports to show that introduction of the MMR vaccine was not associated with an increase in autism. I recommend that readers take the time to download and read the critiques of these studies (and more) that you can find at the Safe Minds website.[4] In the meantime, please look at this graph from Denmark (taken from one of the critiques on the Safe Minds website) showing quite clearly that introduction of the MMR vaccine was associated with an increase in Autism diagnoses.
Those who forget the lessons of history… The saddest thing in the attacks against Wakefield et al, is that the link between vaccination and autism did not start in 1998. In fact, it did not even start with the MMR vaccine. The link was noted in the medical literature before there was even a word for autism. For a great perspective on this issue, I recommend the book by medical historian, Dr Harris Coulter, called Vaccination: Social Violence and Criminality. From the early 1920s, a condition referred to as epidemic encephalitis started to be reported on in the medical literature. When children contracted epidemic encephalitis, the most common side effects were behavioural difficulties (lack of empathy, trouble sleeping, anger and aggression, etc.) and neurological symptoms such as seizures, tics, echolalia (though they did not use that word then, they did report on nonsense speaking and repetition of words) and mental retardation. In adults, the side effect that was reported most was Parkinson’s disease with its associated tremors. Though there was no word for autism at that time or for almost 30 years after this point, the symptoms described were symptoms, which today, would most likely lead to a diagnosis of autism. Epidemic encephalitis was described as following after vaccination – especially after vaccination with the monovalent whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine. In fact, several decades later, pertussis vaccines were used in laboratory animals to induce and study what was referred to as ‘acute allergic encephalomyelitis’ – a form of encephalitis (a swelling of the brain usually caused by an infection or a reaction to some toxic substance that has passed the blood-brain barrier), which is known to be caused by allergic reactions. Though this shot was used to induce the condition in laboratory animals, when the same thing happened in children who had recently been vaccinated, it was called coincidental. One of the ingredients of the pertussis vaccine has been and is still today thiomersal – a mercury-based preservative that has been associated with an increased risk of neurological damage. (I will give more information about this issue when responding to another of Dr Rachie’s ‘vaccine myths’) Mercury, along with several other vaccine additives such as formaldehyde and aluminium, has the ability to break through the defences surrounding the central nervous system (the blood-brain barrier) and to allow infectious agents and toxins to reach this most vital area of our body. This is one of the reasons why the vaccine was used to induce encephalitis in laboratories since it is not easy to get through these defences. Another of Dr Wakefield’s hypotheses in his initial 1998 case series – and one which was expanded upon by both Dr Wakefield and other independent researchers around the world, was the role that the gut plays in both protecting us from disease (Dr Wakefield is a gastroenterologist) and, when damaged by toxins, inducing autistic symptoms. For those who have had children on the autistic spectrum who were recovered by biomedical treatments, you know that healing the gut will often lead to a reduction or a complete remission of the symptoms of autism. One of the tragic consequences of the attacks on Wakefield, Murch and Walker-Smith has been the difficulty that parents now have in finding doctors who will treat their autistic children in the same way that these health professionals did. Though no parents complained about their treatment by Wakefield – in fact, they wanted to defend him before the GMC but were not allowed – it is now professional suicide to help children with autism in this way. As a result, many children who were getting better have stopped improving and in many cases, regressed as a result. People who suppress this information, who are responsible for the attacks on Wakefield and his co-authors, are also responsible for the harm done to these children and the children who have come after them. It is my hope that when the dust settles and the truth finally does emerge (as it will), those who are responsible will be held accountable though it does nothing to help these children today. Though Rachie seems to be trapped in a time warp beginning and ending in 1998 with Wakefield’s original paper, the fact is that the link between vaccination was discussed widely prior to Wakefield and by many others since that time. For more information on these issues, I recommend reading the following book and papers:
The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Man-Made Epidemic by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill
V Uhlmann, C M Martin, O Sheils, L Pilkington, I Silva, A Killalea, S B Murch, J Walker-Smith, M Thomson, A J Wakefield, and J J O'Leary, 'Potential viral pathogenic mechanism for new variant inflammatory bowel disease', Molecular Pathology, Mol Pathol. 2002 April; 55(2): 84–90, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=11950955 That Paper – by Dr Andrew Wakefield - http://www.autismone.org/content/paper-andrew-wakefield-mb-bs-frcs-frcpath
In conclusion Has science (in the name of Dr Rachie) proven that the link between vaccination and autism is a myth?
[1] http://www.theage.com.au/national/thousands-dying-from-preventable-hospital-errors-says-professor-20110307-1bl7e.html#ixzz1ZvfYBjiR
[3] http://www.aerzteblatt.de/v4/archiv/pdf.asp?id=80869
[4] http://www.safeminds.org/research/commentary.html