Slaughtering the Sacred Cow: Getting Real About the Polio Vaccine

There comes a time when we all have to come to terms with a more complex worldview than we were often raised with. We find out that some of the ideas we hold most dear are, in fact, more complicated than we have been led to believe or sometimes blatantly false. The so-called “Boston Massacre” was not actually an unprovoked attack on American colonists, but rather a riot that started from British soldiers attempting to defend themselves against an attack by a crowd of irate Bostonians. Though he was a great leader who helped change America by inspiring peaceful protests for civil rights, the late Martin Luther King Jr. was also very human and FBI wiretaps did confirm that he often struggled with infidelity. Thomas Edison was a brilliant and visionary man whose inventions have made life better for humanity,  but in his zeal to promote his direct current electricity, he not only failed to properly compensate Nicola Tesla for Tesla’s work with Edison, but also conducted public demonstrations where he electrocuted animals (and a criminal) to discredit Tesla’s and Westinghouse’s alternating current electricity. Sometimes, we have to slaughter a sacred cow to see the truth. The polio vaccine is no exception.

The polio vaccine is one of America’s most cherished innovations. It’s pretty much up there with mom, apple pie and the American flag. Jonas Salk is one of the most celebrated figures of the twentieth century. Any attempt to point out any potential weaknesses are typically met with arguments that the polio vaccine has saved countless lives by preventing death and disability. The reality is that most of what you have heard about the polio vaccine is false.

You’ve heard that right after the introduction of polio vaccine, polio rates dropped dramatically and the vaccine was responsible for this decline. What do records from the 1950’s tell us about polio? Page LII of the Vital Statistics of the United States 1955 Volume I notes that: “…deaths from acute poliomyelitis fell below those for any year since 1947. While the drop was coincidental with the introduction of the poliomyelitis vaccine, very little of the decline can be attributed to its decline in 1955. This disease causes deaths among young adults as well as among children and the rates for almost every age group declined in 1955.” This report describes the polio vaccine is being only coincidental to the decline in polio rates.

Two vaccines emerged which both claimed to be able to defeat polio: the inactivated polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and the oral live-attenuated vaccine (frequently administered through sugar cubes) developed by Albert Sabin. Controversy existed among researchers over which one was effective and safe, however both were used in the United States throughout the twentieth century. In the 1970’s and 1980’s lawsuits were brought before U.S. government by individuals who claimed they had been infected with polio by the live oral polio vaccine campaign of 1962. In 1993, the federal district court of Maryland ruled that individuals had a legal right to sue the government for damages from the oral polio vaccine even though the 1962 oral polio vaccine (OPV) campaign had originally been considered above the law because it was deemed an extraordinary humanitarian effort. The claimants were awarded seven figure sums by the U.S. government. (The Coming Plague Laurie Garret 182. Please note, this is a very pro-vaccination book.) Vaccine acquired paralytic polio (VAPP) continued to persist through the end of the 20th century. According to the CDC, between 1980 and 1999 162 cases of paralytic polio were confirmed in the United States,  154 of which were VAPP.  So while the OPV was supposedly lowering polio rates, it was actually adding to them.

Oops.

But the OPV isn’t the only way to acquire paralytic polio. Throughout the twentieth century, provocative polio was a hotly debated phenomenon. Provocative polio is when polio is brought on (provoked) by a medical procedure. Tonsil/adenoid surgery was first implicated for polio provocation. In 1910 doctors observed that children who had throat surgery during a polio outbreak had an increased risk of contracting polio within the first 1-2 weeks after the operation. Physicians in the US Army and many leading health officials warned that it was better to hold off on tonsil surgery until after the polio season was over, though others said the risk was negligible.

One very well-documented medium for provocative polio turned out to be intramuscular injection, especially for vaccination with the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) shot. By 1952, leading health and medical organizations in the United States advised that vaccination with the DTP shot should wait until after the high season for polio was over. The problem of polio provocation persisted in third world countries where aid workers noticed children developing paralysis after receiving the DTP vaccine. In 1980, public health researchers noticed that several children had become paralyzed in the limb where they had recently received their DTP shot. (J.K. Martin described the the same occurrence in his 1949 study titled Local Paralysis in Children After Injections.)  In an effort to combat polio provocation, researchers began examining the relationship between injections and polio. In 1998, Drs. Matthias Gromeier and  Eckard Wimmer found that injury to tissue to during certain types of injections allowed the polio virus easy access to nerve channels, thereby increasing the likelihood of paralysis. The more recent HV Wyatt study from 2003 found that three-quarters of children with paralytic polio receive injections just before the onset of paralysis. So, what we have is an outbreak of a disease for which vaccination with injections was substantially responsible and we have attempted to fight it with more vaccine injections.

Ironically enough, a 2011 study from the Indian Journal of Public Health described a several cases of provocative polio brought on by vaccine injections. Because of the high rate of disability it has caused in some villages, they are now encouraging the use of the oral polio vaccine in hopes of preventing further cases of vaccine induced paralysis. Of course, the United States stopped the use of the OPV in 2000 because of the lingering problem of VAPP.

During the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s some of the research on vaccines was conducted on prison inmates and the mentally ill. Even the beloved Dr. Jonas Salk co-authored a federally funded study in 1942 in which male prison inmates were injected with an experimental vaccine and then deliberately exposed to the flu virus several months later. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/27/AR2011022700988.html pg.1 Mike Stobbe)

You have probably heard that because of the polio vaccine, parents no longer need to live in fear of their children coming home form school sick and then becoming seriously ill. Did you know you can still develop paralysis from enteroviruses like polio, despite the polio vaccine? Since polio is said to be eliminated from the United States, these types of enteroviruses are called non-polio enteroviruses. The CDC states that these viruses (often manifesting as cold-like illnesses in the summer and fall) often produce no symptoms or mild symptoms, but can cause serious infection and paralysis.  Curiously enough, despite the fact that so-called non-polio enteroviruses can potentially cause the same serious effects as polio, there is no vaccine for them and in fact the CDC recommends hand washing and good hygiene to prevent transmission.

This brings up a lot of very interesting questions. How much testing was done to determine whether a case of paralysis was caused by polio vs. non-polio enteroviruses? Could non-polio enteroviruses  have caused cases of paralysis in the pre-vaccine era? Could polio have persisted after the introduction of the vaccine, but was diagnosed as non-polio enteroviruses because doctors believed that it was impossible for a vaccinated individual to develop polio? (A sort of medical “blind spot”.)

And how about the charitable campaigns to stop polio in third world countries? How is the global polio eradication effort going?

The polio vaccine has had a very bad track record in third world countries. The April 23, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal describes how Bill Gates is having to rethink his stance on battling polio in Africa with vaccines. Mr. Gates gave $700 million dollars for a mass polio vaccination campaign in Nigeria. Despite the campaign, which included door-to-door vaccinators, polio still persists in Nigeria and in fact, half of the 1,600 cases of polio reported in 2009 happened in vaccinated individuals. The 1988-1989 outbreak of polio in the African country of Oman found that “a substantial proportion of fully vaccinated children had been involved in the chain of transmission.”

And last of all, I think it is only fitting to take a realistic look at Jonas Salk and see him as a person, not just a mythical hero. During the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s research on vaccines was conducted on prison inmates and the mentally ill. There was a definite sense that it was acceptable to experiment on people who didn’t have full rights in society; they were sacrifices for the sake of progress and science.  Like many of his contemporaries, Dr. Salk participated in human experimentation. He co-authored a federally funded study in 1942 in which mental patients were injected with an experimental vaccine and then deliberately exposed to the flu virus several months later. Most of the patients were unable to fully describe their symptoms or the procedure they were undergoing, which means that the research it yielded had serious flaws.

Salk himself was aware that there were potential dangers with polio vaccination and said “When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine, you don’t sleep well for two or three months.” His fears may have been well-founded. On April 24, 1955, polio broke out among children who had received a batch of Salk’s IPV that had been manufactured at Cutter Laboratories in California. Eleven children died as a result.

Salk was friends with Basil O’Connor, the president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now the March of Dimes). O’Connor was known to be highly influential and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did a great deal of politicking and lobbying for Salk’s polio vaccine. Salk himself acknowledged that his IPV would not have gained as much traction as it did had it not been for O’Connor and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

Accounts from his contemporaries paint a picture of a man who was very driven and ambitious, sometimes egotistical and unwilling to appreciate the efforts of his fellow researchers in developing the IPV.

It is ironic that many of the accusations leveled at Andrew Wakefield- a disregard for test subjects, flawed data, less than altruistic motivations- could be also apply to Jonas Salk.

If we look at the facts, a very different picture of the polio vaccine begins to emerge and we find medical technology with a lot of good press but poor results. While it’s difficult to let go of the story of the story we were raised with, slaughtering the sacred cow actually is to everyone’s benefit. If we start basing our health policies on the facts about polio and not what we want to believe, we can actually start to fight the disease far more effectively.

Update 11/14/14- Where are all the children in iron lungs? Surely the fact that we no longer see children in iron lungs must be proof of polio’s eradication? Sorry, but no. In fact, since the polio vaccine, cases of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) have increased. India was certified polio-free, but it has some of the highest rates of AFP in the world now. AFP can cause paralysis which requires an oxygen tank (rather than an old iron lung). You’ve probably even seen children with oxygen tanks on occasion, I know I have. The United States has started seeing an increase in children with paralysis from enteroviruses as well.

Update 12/18/15 An excellent article on the many difficulties facing the polio eradication program can be found here: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/28/4/1079.full This isn’t just a problem of funding or superstitious people who refuse the vaccine. This details the very real challenges with surveillance, the live polio vaccine- especially in HIV positive individuals and a number of other obstacles that we typically don’t hear about from the news media. I highly recommend it.

Update 7/9/16- Interesting fact: In the 1954 poliomyelitis vaccine field trial for the Salk IPV vaccine, a vaccine trial group, a saline placebo group and a control group who received neither the vaccine nor the placebo were all studied for polio rates. The vaccinated group experienced polio at a rate of 28 per 100,000, the placebo group experienced polio at a rate of 69 per 100,000 and the control group who received neither experienced polio at a rate of 46 per 100,000.- Basic Biostatistics: Statistics for Public Health Practice, Second Ed., B. Burt Gerstman, pg. 30. My hypothesis for why the control group fared better than the placebo group is that the placebo group may have experienced provocative polio.   

Everything You Should Know About Pertussis And Haven’t Been Told

You’ve probably been seeing campaigns about the adult pertussis shot. (“If your baby could talk, she would tell you to get the pertussis shot!”) Pertussis is also one of the diseases that Dr. Sears feels it is most important to vaccinate children for since pertussis is very common and can kill young babies. You may be thinking that the greatest risk for your newborn contracting pertussis lies in individuals who are not vaccinated for the disease.

You would be wrong. The reality is that even if you have been vaccinated for pertussis, there is a very strong possibility that you will still catch pertussis and pass it on to others.

Many parents have been lulled into a false sense of security because they don’t see children coughing and whooping. Before you get too smug and lecture about how you have removed yourself and your children from the epidemiological chain consider that it is a medically documented fact that individuals who have been vaccinated for pertussis and contract the disease often don’t display any symptoms. Yep, you can have pertussis and not even know it.

But what about everything you have been hearing about how pertussis vaccination has saved lives and is responsible for public health safety?

A 2013 study showed that the acellular pertussis vaccine that is currently used is actually far less effective than the older whole cell pertussis vaccine that was used until the 1990’s.  On the other hand, the medical community acknowledges that the whole cell vaccine was discontinued and is not likely to be brought back because of it carries an increased risk of mild and severe side effects.

Take a look at the following cases:

• On the CDC’s website there is a dispatch describing cases of pertussis in fully vaccinated Israeli children which resulted in the death of one vaccinated infant. The report examined 46 fully vaccinated children, five of whom tested positive for pertussis, though only two of those children met the World Health Organization’s diagnostic criteria for pertussis. The study concluded that even vaccinated, asymptomatic children can be carriers of pertussis.
•  In Lithuania 53 children tested positive for pertussis in 2001. 32 of the 53 were fully vaccinated.
• The recent outbreak of pertussis in San Diego showed that many vaccinated individuals can still contract pertussis and pass it to babies too young to receive vaccines. Of the 1,000 adults and children who tested positive for pertussis in 2010, over half had been vaccinated.
• A survey of nine other counties in California showed that between 44 and 83 percent of individuals with pertussis had been immunized. Researchers from Amsterdam said they had found that the pertussis virus had mutated two decades ago. Currently, pertussis vaccines do not confer immunity against the mutated form. Vaccine makers have said that testing for the mutation wasn’t necessary.
• In 2002, vaccine proponent Arthur Allen wrote an article titled Bucking the Herd about the importance of vaccination to prevent the outbreak of disease. In his article, Mr. Allen stated that pertussis has become endemic in Boulder, Colorado and blames it on the high number of unvaccinated children there. He undermines his own argument, though, when he states “Although unvaccinated children are six times as likely as vaccinated children to get whooping cough during an outbreak, about half the cases in Colorado have involved vaccinated children…”  If half the children in Colorado with pertussis have been vaccinated, then obviously they are not six times less likely to contract the disease. If vaccines actually are as effective as public health and medical authorities claim they are, then herd immunity shouldn’t make a difference in protecting vaccinated individuals. If vaccination rates drop, then vaccinated individuals should still be protected against the disease while unvaccinated individuals succumb to it. If vaccines can only work in a “sterile” environment where the pathogen is no longer  present, then vaccines would be incapable of eradicating diseases.
• In September 2010 a fully vaccinated child contracted pertussis in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Yes, you can vaccinate for pertussis, but that doesn’t mean that it will stop the spread of it. Considering the abysmal failure rate of the pertussis vaccine, we should probably begin to call into question assertions that it was responsible for dramatic decreases in pertussis death rates. Take a look at Tavia Gordon’s Vital Statistics report chart from 1953. The pertussis death rate actually reached an all time high of approximately 17 per 100,000 in 1918- four years after the introduction of the pertussis vaccine in 1914. The pertussis death rate continued to decline throughout the first half of the twentieth century at roughly the same rate as other diseases like scarlet fever (which we don’t vaccinate for) and measles (vaccine introduced in the 1960’s).

Much has been said about the safety of vaccine excipients. Before you start getting up on a soapbox about how vaccine excipients are safe, ask yourself how you feel about injecting your child wight he following:

• formaldehyde ( a known carcinogen and mutagen), which is in all pertussis shots, both DTaP and Tdap.
• gluteraldehyde, closely related to formaldehyde, known to cause eczema and asthma (Was this in the shots they were giving thirty years ago? I wonder if it could be responsible for the horrible eczema that plagued me as a baby and into elementary school. Nothing conclusive, but something I wonder.)
• 2-phenoxyethanol (Daptacel, Pentacel and Adacel), a preservative known to depress the central nervous system and cause vomiting and diarrhea. In fact, in 2008 the FDA warned mothers not to use a brand of nipple cream that had phenoxyethanol in it because of the danger to babies.
• Polysorbate 80 (Infanrix, Pediarix, Kinrix, Boostrix), which is an insecticide actually classified as a List C pesticide under the 1988 Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.
• Those with objections to the use of animals or abortion should take note that all pertussis vaccines contain animal cell cultures (bovine is especially favored) and Pentacel contains cell cultures from an aborted fetus designated MRC-5.

Are you getting concerned?

While the pertussis vaccine may not be the safest or most effective way of combatting whooping cough, there are alternatives.

High doses of Vitamin C may have a profound effect on pertussis. Before the advent of antibiotics, some doctors began experimenting with high doses of Vitamin C in treating pertussis and other bacterial infections.

A number of studies from the first half of the twentieth century showed excellent results in the treatment of pertussis with high doses of vitamin C. Otani was the first to experiment with high dose Vitamin C therapy for pertussis and his results were soon replicated by other doctors. His favored methods was injections or intravenous Vitamin C.

The 1937 Ormerod and Unkauf study detailed 10 cases of pertussis in 9 children and one adult that all responded very well to high dose oral Vitamin C therapy. Usually pertussis takes six weeks (sometimes more) for full recovery, but the Ormerod cases averaged around two weeks. The paroxysmal coughing spasms were also reduced to days instead of weeks.

In 1938, Ormerod conducted another study of high dose Vitamin C therapy with further successful results. The protocol he developed involved giving 350 mg on the first day of therapy, 250 mg the second and third days, 200 mg on the fourth and fifth days, 150 on the sixth and seventh days and 100 mg every day thereafter until all symptoms were gone for two days. (Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins, Thomas E. Levy, M.D., 2009, pg. 117) Sesa in 1940 reported excellent results in giving infants with pertussis injections of 100 mg to 500 mg of Vitamin C. Meier in 1945 reported a marked reduction in coughing fits in infants that he treated with both oral and injected Vitamin C. (Levy, pg. 118)

These early researchers noted that pertussis cases often presented with scurvy (a disease associated with Vitamin C deficiency), regardless of diet. This led them to conclude that pertussis actually depleted the body’s Vitamin C stores, so high doses are needed to help the body fight off the infection.

Dr. Thomas Levy states that Vitamin C therapy should always be used along with treating pertussis or any other infectious disease and that a regular high intake of Vitamin C should also prevent pertussis as well  (Levy, pg. 118).

On the Internet there is a lot of talk about treating pertussis with an extremely high dose regime from Dr. Frederick Klenner, but Klenner never actually treated pertussis with his protocol (Levy, pg. 118). (However, Klenner did report succesfully treating other infectious diseases and autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis.)

With the advent of antibiotics, Vitamin C protocols fell by the wayside, so if your child does contract pertussis, it’s unlikely she will receive high dose Vitamin C at the hospital. It might be useful to consult a qualified naturopath in conjunction with any conventional therapies for pertussis.

You could also consult a homeopath. The homeopathic remedy drosera has been used to successfully treat pertussis for over 100 years.

Depending on symptoms, other remedies such as ipecacaunha or pulsatilla can be used. With pertussis, it can be tricky to match the right homeopathic because the symptoms (i.e. type of cough, mucus, etc.) change constantly, but homeopathy can be very helpful in treating this disease.

Because vaccinated individuals and  babies under 6 months often don’t display the “classic” whooping cough symptoms, pertussis can creep up on the unwary and unprepared. That’s why it is important to know the symptoms.

Unvaccinated children and adults will  first have cold–like symptoms such as a runny nose, low-grade fever and mild coughing for one to two weeks. After that there will be violent coughing fits that often end with a “whoop” sound. Often the paroxysms will cause exhaustion or vomiting in between fits. This lasts for around 1–6 weeks, sometimes longer.

Once the paroxysmal state is over, there is a 2–3 week convalescent stage when the coughing gradually tapers off, but the individual is still very susceptible to respiratory infections. With high dose Vitamin C therapy,  the paroxysmal state may last only a few days and be far less severe, with a shorter convalescent stage as well.

Infants under 6 months often will not have any coughing. One of the keys to spotting pertussis in young babies is apnea (pauses in breathing during sleep). If you notice your baby frequently stops breathing during sleep, it could be pertussis.

Update: A study published in the April 2014 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases showed that the  TDaP vaccine is only 47% effective amongst adolescents ages 13-16. From Medscape’s report on it: “When asked whether they would recommend any changes to public policy on the basis of this data, Dr. Liko (author of the study) said no, but that, “public health officials should continue to reassure that vaccination as recommended by [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] is associated with lower risk of pertussis among children and adolescents.” 

So let’s get this straight. You know that pertussis vaccination is so ineffective it couldn’t possibly create herd immunity. You know that it won’t protect even half of the teens and adults who get it. But nothing needs to change and public health officials should make sure that people continue to use the said ineffective product. This kind of response will certainly line the pockets of manufacturer’s but will not stop the spread of pertussis.

Update February 2016: Antibiotics can kill of bordetella pertussis, the bacteria that causes pertussis, but it can’t actually alter the course of the progression of the disease. Secondary conditions like uncontrollable vomiting, hypoxia, and dehydration can result from the severity of the coughing, and the antibiotics can’t actually treat these symptoms- it just kills off the b. pertussis bacteria. This is why pertussis remains difficult to treat even with antibiotics. Here’s a link for a study:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15674946

Scientists have recently discovered antibiotic resistant pertussis bacteria strains. http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/18/6/12-0091_article