From Journal of the AIH, March 1983; included in R. Mendelsohn, ed., Dissent in Medicine, Contemporary Books, Chicago, 1985

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.

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 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 began 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] Finally, 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.

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Notes

1. Mortimer, E., "Pertussis Immunization," Hospital Practice, October 1980, p. 103.

2. Ibid., p. 105.

3. Dubos, R., Mirage of Health, Harper, 1959, p. 73.

4. Ibid., pp. 74-75.

5. Stewart, G., "Vaccination Against Whooping Cough: Efficiency vs. Risks," Lancet, 1977, p. 234.

6. Medical Tribune, Jan. 10, 1979, p. 1.

7. Cherry, J., "The New Epidemiology of Measles and Rubella," Hospital Practice, July 1980, pp. 52-54.

8. Unpublished data from the New Mexico Health Department.

9. Lawless, M., "Rubella Susceptibility in Sixth-Graders," Pediatrics 65: 1086, June 1980.

10. Cherry, op. cit., p. 49.

11. Infectious Diseases, January 1982, p. 21.

12. Cherry, op. cit., p. 52.