Freewheel Burning

as one would expect. The Institute of Medicine within the National Academies of Sciences recently produced a 230 page report addressing the concerns of parents that the current recommended vaccine schedule is too “crowded” and thus puts children at excessive risk.

Upon reviewing stakeholder concerns and scientific literature regarding the entire childhood immunization schedule, the IOM committee finds no evidence that the schedule is unsafe. The committee’s review did not reveal an evidence base suggesting that the U.S. childhood immunization schedule is linked to autoimmune diseases, asthma, hypersensitivity, seizures, child developmental disorders, learning or developmental disorders, or attention deficit or disruptive disorders.

Existing mechanisms to detect safety signals — including three major surveillance systems of FDA-approved products maintained by the CDC and a supplemental vaccine safety monitoring initiative by the FDA—provide further confidence that the current childhood immunization schedule is safe.

It’s quite a tempting narrative. Small defenseless children are jabbed multiple times, allowing harmful foreign substances to enter the body, all with the nefarious intent of making profits for large pharma giants. However, children are assaulted by pathogens from the second they exit the birth canal, and continue to be throughout the course of their lives.

The inactivated versions of the pathogens they might otherwise come into contact with should present no extra burden to an immune system that already anticipates invasion. Of course, coming into contact with a dead version of a pathogen is far preferable to coming into contact with the live version. The assertion that the schedule is “crowded”, given daily attacks on the immune system, is completely absurd.

Moreover, the report found that States with loose vaccine policy, have higher incidence of disease, in this case Pertussis:

While parents generally worry about children’s health and well-being, and their concerns about immunization safety can be viewed in that context, delaying or declining vaccination has led to outbreaks of such vaccine-preventable diseases as measles and whooping cough that may jeopardize public health, particularly for people who are under-immunized or who were never immunized. States with policies that make it easy to exempt children from immunizations were associated with a 90 percent higher incidence of whooping cough in 2011.

Of course, we are experiencing record numbers of Pertussis cases. It must be noted, that like influenza, most cases of Pertussis are asymptomatic. In fact, it is estimated that 5 out of 6 cases of Pertussis come without symptoms, yet transmission occurs. (2 out of every 3 influenza cases are asymptomatic. Next time someone tells you they never get the flu, don’t believe them.) Unvaccinated people may still contract the disease, not experience symptoms, and still pass it one to an unvaccinated person, who, of course, could very well die.

Many of the diseases on the vaccine schedule are very much still in circulation. One excellent example is tetanus, a bacteria which lives happily in soil (not rust, as commonly believed). Tetanus passes through our digestive tract regularly through food, but when the bacteria enter the other parts of the body, particularly the low-oxygen environment of the muscles, the usual outcome is to suffer for months and often die a truly horrible death. Nearly all cases of tetanus in the US occur in unvaccinated individuals.

Given tetanus’ ubiquity in the environment, I often scratch my head when parents tell me they don’t vaccinate their children as the risks of the disease far outweigh the risks of the vaccine. Here, of course, it isn’t the vaccine that’s killing kids, but politics and self-serving conspiracy hacks.