by Richard Moskowitz, M.D.

Autoimmune diseases have always seemed obscure, aberrant, and bizarre because nobody has ever proposed a valid reason why living organisms would suddenly begin to attack and destroy their own tissues. They make a lot more sense, and must indeed be reckoned as "healthy," if destroying chronically infected cells is the only way to eliminate their persistent and even more serious threat to life.

If that is true, then tumor formation could also be understood as simply another more advanced stage of chronic immune failure, as the host, weakened by the strain of attempting to make antibodies against itself, gradually becomes less and less able to withstand it, and eventually the chronically infected and genetically transformed cells, no longer unequivocally "self" or "non-self," begin to free themselves from the normal restraints of "histocompatibility" within the architecture of the surrounding tissues and to multiply more or less autonomously at their expense. Tumors might then be described as "benign" insofar as the loss of histocompatibility remains strictly limited to their cell type or tissue of origin, and "malignant" to the extent that it spreads to other cell types, tissues, and organs, and even more remotely to other areas in the body.

In any case, if these speculations turn out to be accurate, the net effect of artificial immunization will have been merely to trade off the acute, epidemic diseases of past centuries for the weaker but far less curable chronic diseases of today, whose accumulated suffering and disability continue to appreciate through life, like a high-interest mortgage loan. In the process, we have also introduced limitless new evolutionary possibilities for the future of ongoing in vivo genetic recombination within the cells of the race.

The Individual Vaccines Reconsidered

While the foregoing was addressed to the vaccination process in general, the equation looks a bit different for each of the vaccines and diseases in question and merits separate consideration.

Currently administered as a single intramuscular injection at 15 months of age, the triple MMR vaccine is composed of attenuated, live measles, mumps, and rubella viruses. Boosters are recommended only for women of childbearing age, when the risk of congenital rubella syndrome is thought to warrant it, although the effectiveness of the repeat dose is highly questionable.

Before the vaccine era, all three diseases were contracted by most schoolchildren before the age of puberty, of whom the vast majority recovered completely, with lifelong immunity and no complications. But they were not always so harmless. Measles, in particular, can devastate a population encountering it for the first time. Carrying it with them into Mexico undoubtedly contributed to the Spaniards' conquest of the Aztec Empire, in which entire villages were decimated by epidemics of smallpox and measles, leaving only small remnants of cowed and weakened survivors to face the bearded horsemen from across the sea. [note 27] In more recent outbreaks among isolated, primitive peoples, the death rate among measles cases averaged 20 to 30%.[note 28]

In most of these "virgin-soil" epidemics, not only measles but also polio and other similar diseases exact their highest toll of death and serious complications among adolescents and young adults in the prime of life, leaving relatively unharmed the group of school-age children before the age of puberty. [note 29] This means that the evolution of a disease like measles from a dreaded killer to a routine disease of childhood is accomplished by the development of "herd" immunity in young children, such when exposed they can activate nonspecific defense mechanisms already in place, resulting in the prolonged incubation period and isially benign, self-limited course described above.

Under these circumstances, the rationale for vaccinating young children against measles is simply that a very small number of deaths and serious complications still occur, mainly pneumonia, encephalitis, and the rare but dreaded subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a "slow-virus" form of the disease with a reported incidence of 1 in every 100,000 cases. [note 30] Pneumonia, by far the commonest complication, is for the most part benign and self-limited, [note 31] and even bacterial pneumonia developing on top of it can be treated effectively.

Now that the death rate from the disease has become so low, the risk of serious complications so minor, and the benefit to kids recovering from it so great, the vaccine, even if it reduced these risks still further, would not be worth the high probability of autoimmune diseases, cancer, and whatever else may result from the propagation of latent measles virus in human tissue culture for life. Ironically, what it has already done is to reverse the natural evolutionary process back to its point of origin, where the disease is seen once again primarily in adolescents and young adults, [note 32] and results in more complications and a usually nastier and more disabling clinical course than it does in younger children.

As for the claim that the vaccine has helped to eliminate measles encephalitis, in my own small general practice I have already seen two children with major seizure disorders which the parents were quite certain had arisen from bad reactions to the measles vaccine, alhough they would never have been able to prove the connection in a court of law and had never even considered the possibility of compensation. Such cases are never included in the official statistics and are therefore routinely omitted from most surveys of the problem. Indeed, merely injecting the virus into the blood would naturally promote the development of visceral complications involving the lungs, liver, and brain, for all of which measles has a known affinity.

Similarly, the case for immunizing against mumps and rubella seems even more tenuous, for exactly the same reasons. When contracted by children before the age of puberty, it too is a benign, self-limiting disease, recovery from which almost always confers lifelong immunity. The principal complication is meningoencephalitis, of which mild or subclinical forms are not uncommon, but the death rate is extremely low, as is the risk of serious or permanent impairment. [note 33]

The mumps vaccine is prepared and administered in exactly the same way as the measles, usually in the same injection, and the dangers associated with it are likewise comparable. Unfortunately, as a result of vaccination it too has become largely a disease of adolescents and young adults, [note 34] age groups which tolerate it much less well. Its commonest and most notorious complication is acute epididymoorchitis, which occurs in 30 to 40% of males affected past the age of puberty, and usually results in atrophy of the testicle on the affected side, [note 35] but the virus has shown a predisposition to attack the ovary and pancreas as well. The greatest favor we could do for our children would be to expose them to measles and mumps when they are six or seven, which would not only protect them from contracting more serious forms of these diseases when they grow older, but also assist their immunological maturation with minimal risk. It almost goes without saying that this is very close to the actual historical evolution of these illnesses before the MMR was introduced.

The same discrepancy is evident in the case of rubella, or "German measles," which in young children is an illness so mild that it often goes undetected, [note 36] while in adolescents and young adults it is more apt to be associated with arthritis, purpura, and other signs of deeper involvement. [note 37] The sole impetus for developing a vaccine was the recognition of congenital rubella syndrome, involving viral damage to the developing embryo in utero during the first three months of pregnancy, [note 38] and the peak of CRS incidence traceable to the rubella outbreak of 1964. Once again, mandatory vaccination has transformed an almost entirely benign, self-limiting illness into a considerably nastier disease among teenagers and young adults of reproductive age, precisely the group that most needs to be protected from it. By far the most effective way to prevent CRS would be simply to expose our children to rubella in grade school: reinfection does sometimes occur, but much less commonly than after vaccination. [note 39]

In the case of diphtheria and tetanus, the equation looks rather different. First, both diseases are serious and at times fatal, even with the finest treatment: this is especially true of tetanus, which still carries a mortality rate of 20 to 50%. Second, both vaccines are prepared not with living diphtheria and tetanus organisms, but only from poisonous substances elaborated by them, which remain highly antigenic even when inactivated by heat, and protect not against infection per se, but against the systemic effect of these toxins, without which both infections would be of minor significance.

It is easy to understand why parents would want to protect their children against these diseases, if safe and effective vaccines were available, and since both diphtheria and tetanus toxoid have been in use for a long time, with a very good safety record on the whole, there has never been much public outcry against them. On the other hand, both diseases are readily controlled by good sanitation and careful attention to wound hygiene, and both have been disappearing rapidly from the developed world since long before the vaccines were introduced.

Diphtheria still occurs sporadically in the United States, often in areas with significant reservoirs of unvaccinated children, but the toxoid is not very protective once the disease actually breaks out, "susceptibles" being no more likely to come down with it than their fully immunized classmates. Thus in the Chicago outbreak of 1969, 25% of the cases had been fully immunized; 12% had received one or more doses of toxoid and serologically tested as fully immune; and 18% tested partly immune by the same criteria. [note 40] So once again we must face the probability that the toxoid has produced not a genuine immunity to the disease, but rather some sort of chronic immune tolerance to it, by harboring highly antigenic residues somewhere within the cells of the immune system, with probable long-term suppressive effects on the immune mechanism in general. This risk is further compounded by the fact that all three of the DPT vaccines are alum-precipitated and preserved with Thiomersal, an organomercury compound, to retard their metabolic breakdown and excretion, so that the antigenic challenge they pose will continue for as long as possible. The truth is that we do not know and have never even attempted to discover what actually becomes of these foreign substances inside the human body.

< previous part (3) | next part (5) >

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes
27. McNeill, W., Plagues and Peoples, Anchor, 1976, p. 184.

28. Burnet and White, Natural History of Infectious Disease, Cambridge, 1972, p. 16.

29. Ibid., pp. 90, 121, et passim.

30. Stegman, A., "Slow Virus Infections," in Vaughan, op. cit., p. 937.

31. Phillips, op. cit., p. 860.

32. Infectious Diseases, April 1979, p. 26.

33. Phillips, "Mumps," in Vaughan, op. cit., p. 891.

34. Hayden, G., et al., "Mumps and Mumps Vaccine in the U. S.," Continuing Education, Sept. 1979, p. 97.

35. Phillips, "Mumps," op. cit., p. 892.

36. Phillips, "Rubella," op. cit., p. 863.

37. Ibid., p. 862.

38. Glasgow and Overall, "Congenital Rubella Syndrome," Vaughan, op. cit., p. 483.

39. Phillips, "Rubella," op. cit., p. 865.

40. Cited in Mendelsohn, R., "The Truth about Immunizations," The People's Doctor, April 1978, p. 1.