Olmsted on Autism: Who Belongs in Jail?

By Dan Olmsted

A few days ago someone handed me a thick binder titled "Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." Stamped on the cover is "Background Materials. Confidential. For Internal Use Only. Do Not Distribute."

Oh well, too late now. The content is not especially Double Super Secret-worthy, despite all the warnings. It's made up of material for members of ACIP to read before their October meeting. ACIP makes vaccine recommendations that filter down to states and then to school districts -- like Prince George's County, Md., which is threatening to jail parents who don't comply.

One of the sections is titled "Immunization Safety," and one of the subsections is on the varicella vaccine -- Varivax, or the chickenpox shot. The section is made up of a reprint of just one article, from 2000, titled "Postlicensure Safety Surveillance for Varicella Vaccine." The seven authors all appear to be with the FDA and CDC, which right away goes to the controversial question of whether federal agencies that approve and promote vaccines should be the same ones studying whether that was a good idea or not. The article has the self-justifying tone you'd expect in these circumstances: "Most of the reported adverse events associated with varicella vaccine appear to be minor, and serious risks appear to be rare. We could not confirm a vaccine etiology for most of the reported serious events; several will require further study to clarify whether varicella vaccine plays a role."

While we're waiting (and waiting) for the results of "further study," it's worth noting that some of the rare-adverse-events-that-might-or-might-not-be-related-to-the-vaccine sound pretty adverse, and pretty likely to be related to the vaccine.

One sidebar is titled "Box 1. Varicella Vaccine Fatality Reports." Here's Patient E: "A 12-month-old boy received VV at a well-baby visit. He had no significant history beyond colds and ear infections, but his father and grandfather had apparently viral enteritis. The patient vomited once and became irritable 3 days after vaccination. He received acetominophen the next day for irritability and fever. ... A rash developed 1 week after vaccination, which a physician diagnosed as roseola, describing it as erythmatous, maculopapular, and extending from torso to groin. An apparently minor recent head trauma from a fall was also noted. Five days later the patient seemed well, but he became irritable and recieved acetaminophen. Some 6 hours later, his mother heard a 'shrill' cry and found the patient supine and convulsing. Emergency personnel found the patient apneic and puseless. At autopsy, he had no histologic signs of VZV (chickenpox virus). 'Morphologic findings to suggest varicella as an etiology are not seen. The findings are interpreted to be most suggestive of early changes of viral meningoencephalitis.'"

The medical prose can't disguise the scenario -- a child gets a chickenpox shot at 12 months, appears to have a violent reaction including a fever and widespread rash, gets pain relievers, goes into convulsions and dies. But the authors point to every other possibility -- he hit his head (who among us can say for sure it was "minor"?); his dad and grandfather were sick (when? and isn't 'viral enteritis' just good old stomach flu?); the virus didn't show up at the autopsy ...
 
Yet elsewhere the authors write, "Reports from 193 patients include a wide variety of central and/or peripheral neuropathic signs or symptoms at a median of 4 days after vaccinations, with 90% of symptoms reported as beginning within 5 weeks. In 50 of 193 cases, the primary pathology may have been associated encephalopathy, ataxia, meningitis, or seizures."

Doesn't that sound a little too much like Patient E to dismiss that child's symptoms as probably unrelated to chickenpox vaccination? It does to me.

As some of you know, I've written extensively on this vaccine, particularly when given at 12 months (the age of Patient E.) and especially in conjunction with the MMR. The net effect is that a developing brain and immune system gets four weakened live viruses at once, and as I wrote in my series Pox, some parents have found what they believe is a link to autism in that combination of factors.

We don't know when Patient E. got his MMR, but ACIP recommends it be given at 12 months -- the same time as the chickenpox shot -- so it's logical to assume it was simultaneous or in close temporal proximity. Interestingly, the chickenpox paper's authors state the following: "Reported seizures after administration of varicella vaccine and MMR clustered in the second week after vaccination to a much greater extent than did reported seizures after receipt of varicella vaccine alone. These patterns support a role of MMR in postvaccination febrile seizures, but further research is needed."

Ah yes, further research. More study. More grant money. Meanwhile parents are dealing with children whose autism they believe was triggered by exactly this "role of MMR" and chickenpox shots.

What does all this have to do with parents possibly going to jail in Prince George's County? Here's what: According to the Washington Post story by Nelson Hernandez on Wednesday, "The threat of legal action is a last resort after months in which Prince George's has struggled to get its 131,000 students immunized for chicken pox and hepatitis B, as mandated by the state."

So what we're mainly talking about here are chickenpox and Hep B shots. I'll skip over Hep B -- other than to say I think it shows how the U.S. vaccine schedule has gone mad, demanding the vaccination of newborns against an illness unlikely to threaten them for another decade and more. But sending parents to jail for not getting their kids the chickenpox shot? Even without the safety concerns I've elaborated above, the threat to the Republic from chickenpox is slight, wouldn't you agree? Some parents still hold chickenpox parties so their kids can get it early, when it's less dangerous, and get over it. The next logical step is for the Public Health Service to infiltrate chickenpox parties and arrest those parents.

There is yet another issue with this vaccine that may be the most serious of all -- it may be triggering a rise in shingles. While chickenpox is minor, shingles is an awful affliction. I'm going to quote at length from this release on the PR Newswire.

"Three different analyses of reported cases of shingles and chickenpox were published today in the October 2003 issue of Vaccine and suggest the threat of a shingles epidemic in the US due to mass vaccination with varicella (chickenpox) vaccine. Data collected under the CDC-funded Varicella Active Surveillance Project (VASP) of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services Acute Communicable Disease Control Unit revealed that when chickenpox disease was significantly reduced in a population, there was an unexpectedly high number of shingles cases among unvaccinated children with a previous history of chickenpox. Shingles is usually mild in children and can be severe in adults. Complications from shingles, which is caused by the reactivation of the chickenpox virus that lies dormant in the body, result in about three times the number of hospitalizations and five times the number of deaths as those from chickenpox disease.

"The analyses were authored by Gary Goldman, Ph.D., a former research analyst with the VASP, using capture-recapture methods. Goldman worked from 1995 through late 2002 at one of three projects in the nation assigned to actively study the effects of chickenpox vaccine and received reports from three hundred different public and private schools, daycares, and healthcare facilities. He observed that because the vaccine is eliminating chickenpox disease, children and adults no longer receive the natural boost to their immune systems that they received from periodic exposures to the disease. Due to the dramatic decline in chickenpox, children are now experiencing a higher incidence of shingles and Goldman predicts that a large-scale increase in shingles incidence will soon become manifest among adults -- a group more susceptible to serious complications."

Of course, this has been tut-tutted away by the CDC and ignored by the mainstream media. But I've spoken with Gary Goldman and I do not believe he is a crank. I believe we face the awful prospect that in waging an unnecessary war against a tolerable affliction, we're triggering the rise of an intolerable one (kind of like Iraq, come to think of it).

In a further irony, a new vaccine against shingles was approved last year. It's manufactured by Merck, which also makes the only chickenpox and MMR vaccines.
In my Pox series last year, I wrote about a clinical trial of ProQuad, a Merck vaccine that combined the MMR and the chickenpox live virus into the same shot -- a four-in-one combo called ProQuad. That was the first time ever that four live viruses were combined into a single shot. Once child in a small trial in Olympia, Wash., became ill and developed autism soon after getting ProQuad. Merck didn't report that autism case -- and another in a similar trial in Olympia -- until I asked them about it.

Then, earlier this year, came a surprise: Merck suspended production of ProQuad. It said the company had run into production problems creating enough chickenpox vaccine for its three products -- the standalone chickenpox shot, Varivax; the new shingles vaccine; and ProQuad, for which Merck had won FDA approval just a few months before. Both ProQuad and the shingles vaccine require multiple-times-more chickenpox virus than the standalone shot -- in the case of ProQuad, 10 times more to overcome a phenomenon called viral interference between the four live viruses. That in itself seems a bit scary to a layman like myself, since there is no question viral interference can suppress the immune system and let one or more of the viruses run wild. (That's part of Andy Wakefield's MMR theory, for which the British medical establishment and a good chunk of the media are busy trying to destroy him.)

It seemed kind of odd that Merck would spend hundreds of milliions of dollars and many years to produce ProQuad -- and then, in the first few months of production find itself without enough chickenpox virus, to fill the syringes; some people wondered if Merck was effectively sneaking it off the market after safety concerns were raised. Merck says no -- that ProQuad is safe, was well-received and selling briskly, and will be back as soon as the shortage is resolved. We'll see.

Meanwhile, it seems to me, all of the above suggests there is a rational argument for not getting the chickenpox vaccine -- take your pick between safety, necessity and unintended consequences. And it looks to me as though, in Prince George's County at least, a lot of parents are making a rational decision. As intelligent consumers, they have "bought into" what they feel their children actually need --  the polio vaccine, for instance -- but decided the chickenpox shot is not worth the time, money or risk. This is how markets work in a capitalist society when they are not being manipulated by monopolies, unfair trade practices or -- in this case -- government involvement that seems remarkably eager to help the vaccine manufacturers make more money.

Time will tell, but I seriously wonder who belongs in jail here.

Comments

[B Campaigne]

You are a human being.
You are not a person, you “have” a person.
A person is your agent in commerce,. A fictitious entity to which rights and duties are ascribed.
To the government and industrialists you are an indentured slave or as the media refers to us, “consumers”.
Before you enter into the world arena let alone the Austim arena you must see where, as an individual, you stand.
Here in Ontario Canada there are over 1000 citizen children on a shameful waitlist to receive funding for ABA/IBI therapies. Time is their enemy. After four years and the Senate / Eggleton paper “Pay Now or Pay Later” and the Canadian National Autism Strategy lies dormant. (Although it is a good document , worth reading)
Canada is founded upon the principles that recognize the Supremecy of God and the Rule of Law.
Both of which are being broken by the Canadian governments both Federal and Provincial.
The Magna Carta, the British North American Act, The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the U.S. Constitution were all written to protect us from the Sovereign.

To all of us parents in the front lines all over the world “Hallelujah to Ya !
At the end of the day it’s just us, our little team and the clinic we run from our homes.

Why is the focus always only on thimerosal?
Included on this list of chemical concerns should also be formaldehyde, M.S.G., aluminum, Butylated hydroxytoluene or B.H.T. and many others.
Don’t let the mainstream media and pharma spin doctors lull you into only focusing on the thimerosal.
Remember these corporations would no doubt lose everything if a connection is made between the preservatives and the world wide vaccine programs.

Our great grandparents our grandparents and our parents were all infected with toxic preservatives through the inoculation programs.
I saw my 5yr old son’s live blood analysis taking place.
I saw live candida yeast in his blood.
I saw the heavy metals as well.
Where do you think it came from?
Leaky gut syndrome comes from the M.M.R jab.

We saw the change in our child right after the second round of vaccinations.

Freedom of the person requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities.
I have come to the conclusion that those who benefit from any societal mechanism rarely wish to understand that mechanism, especially if it appears to grant them power or authority and understanding it or any alternatives would restrict, diminish or destroy that power apparently granted.
They live in a vapid world of learned assumptions.
Lets face it if you have acronyms after your name your whole goal is to get published and funded no matter how ridiculous your position is.
Most if not all of the researchers and their research are in the pocket of Big Pharma. They have lobbied their way into the core of our societies. I feel sorry for the caregivers who actually administer the jab and wonder how they are going to live with themselves after the truth comes out.
If we put up with this our children will be next.
It’s not the vaccines it’s the toxins therein.
A child on the spectrum is born every 20 minutes. What do they all have in common?
Wake up people.

[Gary S. Goldman, Ph.D.]

I have since published additional peer-reviewed manuscripts concerning chickenpox (varicella) and shingles (herpes zoster), including these two recent papers:

1. Universal varicella vaccination: Efficacy trends and effect on herpes-zoster. Goldman GS. International Journal of Toxicology, 2005 July-Aug.;24(4):205–13.
2. The Case against Universal Varicella Vaccination. [Commentary] Goldman GS. International Journal of Toxicology, 2006 Sept.-Oct.,25(5):313–17.

Additionally, I have written a 300+ page book entitled, The Chickenpox Vaccine: A New Epidemic of Disease and Corruption, available at www.InjectionBook.com

[Diane]

A couple of thoughts, the first being about Merck, a stock I've owned way before I had kids. After my daughter developed autism I had to start looking into how this happened (yes, I could shoot myself for not doing that BEFORE I allowed her be vaccinated.) I was furious and wanted to sell the Merck stock. But I didn't, for a whatever kind of reason. Now, with them being so damm smart over there, I think I'll just let it grow. Maybe it will pay for some of her treatments or a home hyperbaric chamber.

As usual, you guys always make me laugh at some point while reading really disturbing stuff. My son got every shot my daughter got within one or two minutes (twins) but thankfully emerged unscathed. In June he developed the chicken pox, albeit an a typical case as the doctor called it. And, yeah! Friends who were smarter than me and didn't give the shot wanted to bring their kids over for playdates! The chicken pox party.

As for the parents in Prince George's County? Go to jail. Do not bow in your beliefs. I only wish I could have gone to jail for a bit instead of my daughter having to deal with what she's going through. (I resist saying her whole life because I am still committed to her full recovery.) So, let this nutty government round up all the moms in the county, fill up the county jail. They can't hold them there forever. I think we need a movement consisting of families who are willing to send their babysitters and nannies and housekeepers to Maryland for a while to help these familes while their moms fight to save the kids.
Diane

[Jana Cahill]

Why if it been showing up lately that more and more people vaccinated are showing signs of Autism, why couldn't it be dismissed as an allergic reation?