Letter

Concerns over evidence for safety

Dear healthmatters — I am unhappy with Robert Wheatley’s response (Letters, issue 22) to my call for a debate of the safety of vaccination. He says that ‘vaccines are remarkably safe’, but on what evidence is this claim based?

First, he argues that the measles vaccine is 95 per cent effective and that he is aware of children who he believes have been wrongly diagnosed. But if they don’t have measles what do they have? The New England Journal of Medicine (26 March 1987) reports a measles outbreak in fully immunised school children: why does this happen if more than 95 per cent are immune?

Second, on polio he says that outbreaks in industrialised countries have been ‘almost exclusively’ among unimmunised groups. But what outbreaks have there been, and is it true that the vaccine itself causes most cases of polio?

The US Centers for Disease Control acknowledged in 1992 that every case of polio in the US in the period 1980-89 was caused by the vaccine.

Third, the whooping cough vaccine is said to be 90 to 95 per cent effective. But a report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (1970) showed that 56 per cent of fully vaccinated children under 4 years developed whooping cough, giving a 44 per cent effectiveness rate; a paper in the Journal of Paediatrics (1989) demonstrated a 45 per cent effectiveness rate in Nova Scotia.

While Wheatley claims that the side effects I listed were ‘fictitious’, the Institute of Medicine Reports 1991/93 states that there is not enough evidence to support or reject a causal link regarding side effects, and that more research needs to be done. A 1993 report from the US National Academy of Science Institute of Medicine concluded that virtually all the vaccines given to children have been shown to cause damage.

Neither Jabs nor The Informed Parent advises people not to immunise their children. They provide information about vaccines taken from medical journals, and support for parents whatever they choose to do. Wheatley asks whether a child might have a claim against a parent who failed to protect them against a preventable disease, but the same question might be asked in relation to a vaccine damaged child. Until recently such children have had no claim against either the vaccine manufacturers or the government.

So why do some children get infections and their complications, and others do not? Surely this would be a more legitimate avenue for research than injecting all children with the same diseases in the same amounts.