by Richard Moskowitz, M.D.

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.

Regarding the MMR vaccine, my experience has thus far been limited to a few cases.

In December of 1980 I saw a 3-year-old boy with a month-long history of swollen glands, loss of appetite, indigestion, and stomach aches, the latter often quite severe and accompanied by belching, flatulence, and explosive diarrhea. In addition to nasal congestion and redness of the eyelids, the parents also reported unusual behavior changes, such as extreme untidiness, wild and noisy playing, and waking at 2 a. m. to get into their bed.

The only remarkable features of the physical examination were several enlarged, tender lymph nodes behind the ear and at the base of the skull, locations favored by rubella, mononucleosis, and a few other infections, and markedly swollen tonsils. This fact reminded the mother that the boy had received the MMR vaccine in October, about two weeks before the onset of his illness, with no apparent reaction to it at the time. Based on this possibility, I gave the child a single dose by mouth of the homeopathic nosode made from the rubella vaccine, and the symptoms disappeared within 48 hours and did not come back.

The following April, the parents brought him back for a mild fever and a three-week history of intermittent pain and soreness in and in front of the right ear, with stuffy nose and other vague cold symptoms. Upon examination the whole right side of the face appeared swollen and tender, especially the cheek and the angle of the jaw, and the right eye was also red and congested. Looking abit like a mild case of the mumps, he responded very well to acute remedies and has been in good health since.

First, this boy is a sort of prototype of the ordinary rubella vaccine case: after two weeks, about the same interval as the normal incubation period for rubella, a nondescript illness develops and slowly becomes more severe than the natural disease in the same age group, with sore, swollen, lymph nodes or abdominal or joint pains, for example, but very little rash or fever. If the rubella component is suspected on account of the unusual pattern of lymph node involvement, the diagnosis may be confirmed by a favorable response to the rubella nosode. Even more interesting was the second illness, where parotid involvement suggests a delayed activation of the mumps vaccine component, and thus raises the frightening possibility of "mixed" or composite responses to two, three, or more combined vaccines either simultaneously or over time.

In April of 1981 I first saw a 4-year-old boy for chronic bilateral soreness and enlargement of the parotids and lymph nodes around and behind the ears, which had begun about a year earlier, when the MMR vaccine was given, and continued with no sign of improvement. Moreover, during that same period he had become much more prone to upper respiratory infections, although they were not particularly severe. Since the mother was two months pregnant and the boy not ill at the time, I was in no hurry to treat him, but not long after the birth he developed acute bronchitis, with recurrent swelling and tenderness of the nodes. After a dose of homeopathic rubella, the acute illness, cough, and swollen glands promptly subsided, but two weeks later he was back with a hard, tender nodule in the right cheek near the angle of the jaw and some pain on chewing or opening the mouth. At that point I gave him the mumps nosode, and he has been well ever since.

As in the first case, the striking feature is the gradual or lingering pattern of the condition, with a definite tendency to become chronic and increased susceptibility to other illnesses and to weak, low-grade reactions in general, in contrast to the vigorous responses typical of acute diseases like measles and mumps when they are acquired naturally.

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Notes
13. Family Practice News, July 15, 1980, p. 2.

14. Ferrante, J., "Atypical Symptoms? It Could Still Be Measles," Modern Medicine, Sept. 30, 1980, p. 76.

15. Cherry, op. cit., p. 53.