September 15, 2013

Measles Outbreak heats up Vaccine Debate

September 15, 2013. Atlanta. The CDC released a report Thursday warning that a small but significant drop in vaccinated children in the US may be causing a spike in measles outbreaks. So far, nobody in the US has died. But pockets of outbreaks are occurring in local communities where the vaccine is shunned. The CDC also admits it actually has no idea if vaccinations are up or down because they changed their polling methods this year.

The CDC annual report on vaccination coverage across the US lists each vaccine, along with comparisons between age groups, states, income levels, race and a host of other qualifiers. The agency also announced that this is the first study compiled using Americans with cell phones. Until now, the CDC mainly surveyed people with land lines, skewing the results and shutting out many young parents who only own a cell phone.

National Immunization Survey

The CDC’s annual NIS survey seems to contradict what most media outlets are reporting. The CDC study clearly states that vaccination levels in the US continue to remain high and stable. The report explains, ‘High vaccination coverage among preschool-aged children has resulted in historically low levels of most vaccine-preventable diseases in the United States. The results of the 2012 NIS indicate that vaccination coverage among young children remained relatively stable and the proportion of children who do not receive any vaccinations has remained low.’ The authors report that less than 1% of US children have never had a vaccine of any kind.

The CDC report also lists out specific vaccinations and the percentage of American children that have received them. For most vaccines, the federal government has long had a target of vaccinating at least 90% of American kids. Here are the actual vaccination rates for some of the more widely pushed immunizations.

From the CDC’s National Immunization Survey (of children aged 19-35 months):

Vaccine – percent of US kids having received it

MMR – 90.8%

Poliovirus – 92.8%

Hepatitis B – 89.7%

Varicella – 90.2%

DTaP – 82.5%

Hib – 80.9%

PCV – 81.9%

Hepatitis A – 53.0%

Rotavirus – 68.6%

Immunization rates by demographic

The CDC report also details that children living below the poverty level had a measurably lower immunization rate compared to their more affluent counterparts. Poorer kids were shown to have between a 6.0% and 9.5% lower vaccination rate, depending on which vaccine is being compared.

The results also showed that black children had a slightly lower immunization rate than white children. But when black and white kids from the same poverty level are compared, the disparity disappears, suggesting the lower vaccination rate for black kids is economic-based more than race-based. Posting the highest vaccination rate of all American children are Native Americans, Alaskan Natives and Asians. Each of those groups posts higher immunization rates than whites, blacks or Hispanics.

The only vaccine mentioned that countered the above race-economic paradigm was the HepB vaccine. The study showed that white children had the lowest immunization rate even after economic factors were equalized. The only exception was with Hispanic kids who posted similar vaccination rates as white kids when their economic level was the same.

The CDC also compared the various states. The state with the lowest combined vaccine series rate was Alaska at only 59.5%. Hawaii posted the highest overall rate at 80.2%. For the popular and controversial MMR vaccine, the report proudly boasts that only 15 states had a vaccination rate below the government’s target of 90.0%. Illustrating one of the vaccines that brings the overall percentages down, the HepB vaccine had an immunization rate ranging from 36.0% in Vermont to 87.6% in Georgia.

Measles outbreaks and the MMR vaccine

So far this year, there have been 159 reported cases of measles in the US. Almost all of them have been traced back to international travelers bringing the disease back from countries like the UK and India. By comparison, the CDC says about 60 people are diagnosed with measles each year. In recent years however, that number has been higher than normal. In 2008, there were 140 cases. In 2011, there were 220.

The CDC study doesn’t miss the opportunity to comment on the recent outbreaks of measles in parts of the US and across the globe. At some points, the CDC report suggests the spike in measles cases may be the result of funding cutbacks to healthcare clinics across the nation that provide the immunizations, especially to the poor.

‘Vaccination coverage continues to vary across states,’ the CDC report explains, ‘Clusters of unvaccinated children leave communities vulnerable to outbreaks of disease. The continued occurrence of measles outbreaks among unvaccinated persons in the United States underscores the importance of maintaining uniformly high coverage to prevent transmission of imported disease. Recent budget cuts to state and local health departments as well as differences by state in factors such as population characteristics, immunization program activities, vaccination requirements for child-care centers, and vaccine financing policies might contribute to variations in vaccination coverage.’

But in a separate report specifically addressing the spike in measles cases in 2013, the CDC seems to blame parents with religious, childcare or other beliefs that differ from the norm. One example given was a cluster of measles victims in Texas recently among a religious community.

As detailed by NPR, Anne Schuchat – director of the CDC’s Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease – blamed parents in communities with religious or philosophical differences for the rise in measles cases. “In some communities, people have been rejecting opportunities to be vaccinated” she said. Among the 159 measles cases reported so far this year, 58 occurred in March in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. In April, 23 additional victims were infected when a North Carolina resident returned from a three-month trip to India and infected his tight-knit religious community here.

The other side of the argument

One of the most passionately fought arguments in the US is the debate over the safety and need for so many vaccines. Our babies are injected with so many immunizations by the age of two that many of the individual vaccines have been combined into literal drug cocktails. And one of those drug cocktails – the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine – is at the heart of the argument.

In an extremely controversial article published by Whiteout Press in July, Dr. Andrew Wakefield is quoted in his response to the British government’s specifically blaming him for the spike in the UK’s measles cases this year. For background, Dr. Wakefield had discovered a pattern seemingly substantiating accusations by many concerned parents that the MMR vaccine was causing autism in rare instances. His findings showed that all the cases he looked at involved children who were immunized for measles with the drug cocktail known as the MMR vaccine. However, among children immunized with three separate vaccines, including the measles vaccine, there was no link to autism.

So while Dr. Wakefield’s findings didn’t produce evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism, it did show some unexplained relationship between the three-drug cocktail and autism that isn’t present when three individual vaccines are given rather than the combined MMR. The result was that parents in the UK began avoiding the MMR vaccine opting instead for the three individual shots. It was at that moment that the UK government inexplicably cancelled the individual vaccine programs, forcing British parents to choose between the MMR drug cocktail or nothing at all. The resulting spike in measles cases in Britain shows which choice many parents made.

One group of concerned British parents recently wrote to us and asked that we let readers know about their online petition. Contrary to what most US news outlets would have you believe, many of these parents aren’t asking for a ban on vaccines due to some conspiracy theory. They’re simply asking governments around the world to stop using drug cocktails like the MMR vaccine and instead, invest more research into the safety of single vaccines. For more information, view their online petition.

Read the controversial Whiteout Press article, ‘Courts quietly confirm MMR Vaccine causes Autism’ for further details.

Horror stories

The recent measles outbreak and accusations of links to autism aren’t the only controversy surrounding multi-national pharmaceutical companies and their billion-dollar vaccines. A shocking report from Natural News last week exposed secret audio recordings of Merck scientists laughing about the dangers of the corporation’s vaccine programs. The main individual on the recordings is Merck’s own Dr. Maurice Hillman. Dr. Hillman is one of the original inventors of the MMR drug cocktail and one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccines and their secret development and dangers.

Also present and heard on the audio tape are an unnamed news reporter, Dr. Shorter, Dr. Sabin, and Dr. Horowitz – all vaccine developers for big phama corporations. Together, they discuss their early days of developing and testing vaccines for Merck. The two most shocking topics are the presence of a cancer-causing virus called SV40 in Merck’s vaccines and the original importation of the AIDS virus in the drug company’s research monkeys.

Excerpts from the recordings (from Natural News):

(introduction)

Dr. Horowitz: Listen now to the voice of the worlds leading vaccine expert Dr Maurice Hilleman, Chief of the Merck Pharmaceutical Company’s vaccine division, relay this problem he was having with imported monkeys. He best explains the origin of AIDS, but what you are about to hear was cut from any public disclosures.

(group discussion begins)

Dr Maurice Hilleman: Well, that was at Merck. Yeah, I came to Merck. And uh, I was going to develop vaccines. And we had wild viruses in those days. You remember the wild monkey kidney viruses and so forth? And finally after six months I gave up and said that you cannot develop vaccines with these damn monkeys. We’re finished and if I can’t do something I’m going to quit, I’m not going to try it. So I went down to see Bill Mann at the zoo in Washington DC and I told Bill Mann, I said, “Look, I got a problem and I don’t know what the hell to do.” Bill Mann is a real bright guy. I said that these lousy monkeys are picking it up while being stored in the airports in transit, loading, off-loading. He said, very simply, you go ahead and get your monkeys out of West Africa and get the African Green, bring them into Madrid, unload them there. There is no other traffic there for animals. Fly them into Philadelphia and pick them up. Or fly them into New York and pick them up, right off the airplane. So we brought African Greens in and I didn’t know we were importing the AIDS virus at the time.

Miscellaneous background voices: (laughter)… it was you who introduced the AIDS virus into the country. Now we know! (laughter) This is the real story! (laughter) What Merck won’t do to develop a vaccine! (laughter).

Dr Maurice Hilleman: Yellow fever vaccine had leukemia virus in it and you know this was in the days of very crude science. So anyway, I went down and talked to him and he said, “Well, why are you concerned about it?” “Well,” I said, “I’ll tell you what, I have a feeling in my bones that this virus is different. I don’t know why to tell you this but I …(unintelligible) …I just think this virus will have some long term effects.” And he said, “What?” And I said, “Cancer.” (laughter). I said, “Albert, you probably think I’m nuts, but I just have that feeling.” Well in the meantime, we had taken this virus and put it into monkeys and into hamsters. So we had this meeting and that was sort of the topic of the day and the jokes that were going around was that, “Gee, we would win the Olympics because the Russians would all be loaded down with tumors.” (laughter) This was where the vaccine was being tested.

Dr Maurice Hilleman: But anyway, we knew it was in our seed stock from making vaccines. That virus you see, is one in 10,000 particles is not an activated… (unintelligible) …it was good science at the time because that was what you did. You didn’t worry about these wild viruses. So then the next thing you know is, three, four weeks after that we found that there were tumors popping up on these hamsters.

Dr. Horowitz: Despite AIDS and Leukemia suddenly becoming pandemic from “wild viruses,” Hilleman said, this was “good science” at that time.

As if the above audio recordings from the nation’s top vaccine pioneers over the past four decades isn’t damning enough, the CDC itself is also guilty of some peculiar and curious vaccine-related actions lately. As reported here by Whiteout Press just last month, a highly controversial CDC Fact Sheet published by the agency has suddenly and mysteriously vanished. The topic of the document was the presence of the cancer-causing SV40 virus in vaccines – the same admission documented above.

The title of the now-missing CDC document is ‘Cancer, Simian Virus 40 (SV40), and Polio Vaccine Fact Sheet’. As we detailed last month, the CDC Fact Sheet admits the SV40 virus is found in monkeys. The virus was originally discovered in 1960 and was routinely included in America’s polio vaccines during the previous ten years. Polio vaccines used monkey body parts and drug companies infected an estimated 30,000,000 Americans with the monkey virus from 1955 to 1963.

The CDC Fact Sheet confesses, ‘More than 98 million Americans received one or more doses of polio vaccine from 1955 to 1963 when a proportion of vaccine was contaminated with SV40; it has been estimated that 10-30 million Americans could have received an SV40 contaminated dose of vaccine.’

Read the Whiteout Press article, ‘CDC pulls Tainted Polio Vaccine Report, denies any Victims’.

So while governments, health officials, pharmaceutical corporations and media outlets unleash their barrage of patronizing condemnation at parents who are fearful and skeptical of the safety of the dozens of vaccines being forced upon their babies, those parents can take solace in the fact that they’re not crazy. These accounts aren’t conspiracy theories. They’re just a few of many actual examples of deadly scandals involving vaccines that never seem to be exposed until decades after the fact. And some parents just aren’t willing to trust or wait for big pharmaceutical corporations to come clean.

Related Whiteout Press articles:

CDC pulls Tainted Polio Vaccine Report, denies any Victims

Supreme Court rules Drug Companies exempt from Lawsuits

Courts quietly confirm MMR Vaccine causes Autism

Doctors slam Big Pharma for price gouging Cancer Patients