My second reason for writing is to show that vaccines are much less safe and effective than we've been led to believe. Keep in mind that they're given purely on the basis of long-term health policy, rather than in response to a genuine public-health emergency.  Most of them are directed against

1. a) diseases that were once life-threatening, but already declining in incidence and mortality before the vaccines were introduced, thanks to improvements in sanitation, water quality, and other public-health measures (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus);11
2. b) ordinary diseases of childhood that most people contracted and recovered from without complications or sequelae (measles, mumps, rubella, flu, rotavirus, chickenpox);12 or
3. c) sporadic illnesses linked to mutant strains of organisms that are part of our normal flora and relatively seldom cause invasive disease (pneumococcus, HiB).13

To be pronounced effective, vaccines need satisfy just two narrow criteria: a significant reduction in the incidence, morbidity, and mortality of the corresponding illnesses following their use; and significant, prolonged increases in the level of serum antibodies against the micro-organisms targeted by them. 

 Vaccines achieving these objectives often prove to have been much less successful when investigated more systematically.  For two reasons, the flu vaccine, for example, is virtually predestined to fail, even when it succeeds in preventing many cases of the strain it is directed against: first, because the extreme mutability of the influenza viruses virtually guarantees that a different vaccine will be needed every year, and sometimes even within the same season, with different specifications that cannot be known in advance; and second, because the generic illness we know as "the flu" is linked to many different viruses, by no means restricted to the influenza group for which it is named.

Some version of the same issue hovers over the other vaccines as well. Even when they satisfy both criteria, the viruses and bacteria they are directed against reliably mutate into different strains of the same or closely-related organisms, which are not counted in the statistics, a process which is greatly accelerated by these determined and systematic attempts to eliminate them. 

The pneumococcus and HiB organisms, for example, are linked to sporadic cases of pneumonia, meningitis, endocarditis, and septicemia involving mutant strains of bacteria that normally reside in the nasopharynx of most healthy people, so that the vaccines targeting them have already elicited new, resistant, and even more pathogenic strains that are altering and will continue to alter that important ecosystem in ways that the CDC and the drug industry cannot foresee and indeed seem myopically unconcerned about.14

A more imminent threat is whooping cough, which was rapidly declining in incidence and mortality before the pertussis vaccine was introduced the 1940's, but has reappeared with a vengeance in the last 20 years, again mainly in vaccinated individuals, and involving, in addition to the wild type, a mutant strain resistant to the vaccine, and a wholly new species that strikes mainly the vaccinated.15

Another is polio, against which both the oral and injectable vaccines have been somewhat effective in preventing large-scale outbreaks like those of the 1950's. In India, which uses the cheaper live, oral version, an even more virulent form of paralytic disease, clinically indistinguishable from the original, has become prevalent in recent years, and was conveniently named Non-Polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis, or NPAFP, lest anyone suspect that the vaccine is to blame.16 In the United States, which declared polio officially eliminated years ago, and has reverted to the original injectable or killed vaccine, another very similar disease has emerged, named Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM) for the same reason, with the related enterovirus D-68 widely suspected as the cause.17

Likewise, the level of specific antibodies in the blood has dismally failed to provide an accurate measure of immune status after vaccination. Even their advocates admit that vaccines are never completely effective, since most targeted diseases continue to break out and even predominate in highly-vaccinated populations, as we saw.18 These alleged "vaccine failures" are then invoked to impose additional booster doses, based on the assumptions

1) that they represent "bad batches," and nothing more;

2) that low antibody levels in the vaccinated mean that the vaccines have simply "worn off," leaving behind nothing but a "blank slate;"

3) that the titer can be ratcheted up to the desired level by simply adding more shots; and

4) that the antibody level is an accurate measure of immune status, of the extent to which the vaccinated are resistant to infection with the natural disease.

Unfortunately, none of these assumptions stands up to careful scrutiny.  First, we already know but choose to forget that the titer can't be simply manipulated at will by adding more boosters.  In 1980, Dr. James Cherry, a leading vaccine advocate, discovered that children receiving the MMR who later developed low titers responded to a booster dose only minimally and for an unacceptably short time.19 A few years later, when measles outbreaks in highly-vaccinated populations generated pressure to do something drastic, Cherry's research was quietly shelved, the booster was mandated, and it remains in force to this day.

Then in 1986, a clustering of several hundred measles cases were reported in the Midwest, of which 94% were in vaccinated schoolchildren, and a sizable number were unusually mild, with a paler rash, no fever, and minimal discomfort, fatigue, or other systemic involvement.20 The scientists researching the outbreak were startled to learn that the milder version was commonest in vaccinated cases with no antibodies at all, while the typical acute illness affected mainly vaccinated kids with high titers in the supposedly "immune" range.21

Indicating viral activity in both subgroups that serological testing had failed to detect, these findings led me to wonder if vaccines with low levels of antibody were being misidentified as susceptible, inappropriately revaccinated, and thus subjected to further complications that were also overlooked. Soon after, I chanced to witness just such a misfortune when asked to review a damage compensation claim following the Hep B vaccine.   The claimant was a young lab tech who developed a nasty cough lasting for many months after a series of three Hep B shots as required for her training.

When she applied for a job four years later, her serum showed zero antibodies to the virus, and her new employer, supposing her to be still susceptible, insisted on a second round. This time she relapsed almost immediately, with an even more intense version of the same cough, followed by a sequence of new complaints, including nodular goiter, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, esophageal reflux, palpitations, and anxiety, requiring maintenance doses of several drugs and medical supervision all year round; and her claim was denied without even a hearing, because none of her complaints were officially-approved complications of the vaccine.22

The vaccine manufacturers design the safety trials.

As to safety, vaccine safety trials, virtually without exception, are funded, conducted, and micromanaged by the manufacturers themselves, and then rubber-stamped by the government agencies that are supposed to be regulating them, a more blatant style of corruption pithily summarized by a former Vice-President of Pfizer who had witnessed and indeed helped to perpetrate it:

Everybody is out there begging for money. The big international corporations have lots of money. They give grants for research, pay doctors and researchers thousands to travel around, speak at conferences, and establish educational programs, all to make profits for their products. The safety trials are supposed to be third-party and independent, but the money won't keep coming unless they say what you want them to say. Everybody knows this is how things work.  Only the public doesn't know it.23

The basic strategies developed to conceal or minimize adverse reactions include the following:

1) instead of inert placebo, the so-called "control" groups are given the toxic chemical ingredients of the vaccines under study, or a different vaccine entirely;24

2) to qualify as vaccine-related, adverse reactions must occur within hours, or days, or at most a week or two after the shot, thus arbitrarily ruling out the entire chronic dimension, within which the majority of them occur.25

3) they must appear on the vanishingly small list already recognized by the industry, thereby excluding the possibility of discovering new ones; and

4) adverse effects reported by the recipients but not specifically asked about by the research team are subject to numerous restrictions, with the lead investigator given complete authority to disqualify them, based on criteria  that are never specified.26 

Naturally, the upshot of these shenanigans has been massive underreporting of adverse reactions, estimated at somewhere between 1% and 0.1% of the true figure.27

The manufacturers have been in command of the process ever since the 1980's, when multiple lawsuits resulted in large payouts for brain damage following the DPT vaccine, whereupon they threatened to stop making vaccines entirely unless Congress excusedthem from all further liability.28  In 1986, Congress acceded to their ultimatum by passing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which created the taxpayer-funded VICP program for compensating claims, and deprived patients and experimental subjects of their right to sue the manufacturer for damages,29 a free ride granted to no other industry. In 2011, the Supreme Court actually signed off on this devil's bargain, ruling that vaccines are "unavoidably unsafe," so that the industry must indeed be excused for whatever deaths or injuries may result from them!30

Evidence of harm.

As a GP caring for families, I've always felt uneasy about giving vaccines routinely, because the diseases they're designed to prevent are acute illnesses, with high fever and a massive, concerted outpouring of immune mechanisms that succeed in expelling the invading organism from the body, whereas vaccination, by contrast, is by definition a chronic process, involving long-term antibody production as an isolated phenomenon that requires the vaccine organism to remain inside the cells of the host for years, with no obvious path or mechanism for getting rid of it.31 

In light of the industry's successful campaign for concealing the harm done by vaccines, the simplest way to approximate the extent of it is to look at it in reverse, at the major health benefits to be acquired by not vaccinating, and simply allowing our children to acquire the ordinary diseases that most of them would naturally be exposed to. Many studies have shown that children who come down with and recover from acute diseases with fever, like measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, and influenza, are significantly less likely to develop chronic autoimmune diseases and cancer later in life than those merely vaccinated against them.32

Another important finding is that the risk of death, hospitalization, and major adverse reactions following vaccines depends much less on which one, than the total number of individual vaccines administered, both simultaneously at the same visit,33 and cumulatively over the patient's lifetime.34  That purely quantitative threat makes it clear that these worst outcomes are not simply idiosyncratic aberrations or genetic mutations of a very few hypersensitive individuals, but regular, predictable consequences of some fundamental property built into the vaccination process itself. 

All by themselves, these studies provide ample justification for questioning and doubting the prevailing assumptions that vaccines are uniformly safe and effective, that they save vast sums of money from not having to care for patients suffering from the corresponding diseases, and that it is OK and even desirable to pile on as many different ones as the traffic will bear.

According to the CDC's current guidelines, children are mandated or strongly recommended to receive a total of 70 doses of individual vaccines by the age of 18,35 and 149 by age 65.36 That doesn't even count the 200-plus vaccines still in the pipeline,37 and the others sure to follow, with no regulation or restraint, and often for no better reason than that we possess the technical capacity to make them.  Incentivized with a blank check of that size, it becomes ever more unlikely that children who obey these guidelines will get to live out a full lifespan, with no autoimmune diseases and cancers to make them suffer and die before their time.

Human rights under attack.

Another bottom line of the fake emergency, and the bad science cited to justify it, is the aggressive campaign by the drug industry, the CDC, and the doctors who follow their lead to dispense with fundamental human rights that have long been inseparable from our democratic way of life, upheld in our courts, and still loudly proclaimed even by those most determined to take them away.

Without a real emergency, forcing parents to vaccinate their children against their will, their best judgment, and their deepest instincts:

1. a) denies them the right to choose the form of health care that they feel is best for their children;
2. b) forces them to accept an unnecessary and unsafe medical procedure without their fully-informed consent; and
3. c) forfeits their children's right to an education if they persist in refusing the procedure.

In contemporary case law, the legal right of parents to decide which form of health care will be given to their children is not absolute, and has been suspended temporarily in life-threatening situations where courts have granted physicians and hospitals temporary custody to perform emergency surgery, for example, when their parents refused to allow it on religious grounds.38   But most vaccinations are given routinely, to prevent diseases that are not imminent, only rarely dangerous, and may never even be in the vicinity. 

In any case, the right of medical patients and experimental subjects to refuse any medical intervention or procedure without their fully-informed consent was unequivocally affirmed in both the Nuremberg Code, which the United States helped write and almost all developed nations adopted in the wake of atrocious Nazi medical experiments in World War II, and the Helsinki Declaration, "Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects," which elaborates on the same issues in a passage that could almost have been written with the vaccine mandates in mind:

In medical research involving competent human subjects, each potential subject must be adequately informed of the aims, methods, sources of funding, any possible conflicts of interest, institutional affiliations of the researcher, anticipated benefits and potential risks of the study and the discomfort it may entail, and any other relevant aspects of the study.

The potential subject must be informed of the right to refuse to participate in the study, or to withdraw consent to participate at any time without reprisal.  After ensuring that the potential subject has understood the information, the physician or another appropriately qualified individual must then seek the potential subject's freely-given informed consent, preferably in writing.39

Regarding children's right to an education, the ACLU sums it up perfectly:

All children living in the United States have the right to a free public education.  The Constitution requires that all be given equal educational opportunity, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or sex, and whether rich or poor, citizen or non-citizen.  Even those in this country illegally have the right to go to public school.40

It is not difficult to imagine a genuine public health emergency, such as a deadly plague or imminent bioterrorist attack, in which it might be necessary to suspend all of these rights temporarily.  But small, localized outbreaks of ordinary childhood diseases most are no such emergency, and still less could they justify depriving children of their right to an education for the rest of their lives.

The upside-down politics behind the mandates.

I have always felt that protecting the rights of parents and children by defeating the new mandates should logically be a popular, winning issue for liberal and progressive politicians, as well as organizations protecting civil liberties, public radio and TV stations, and a majority of the news media.

At the moment, however, the strictest of the new laws have been enacted or proposed in the blue-est of blue states, while their main opponents seem more closely aligned with the GOP, claiming descent from Ronald Reagan and seeing government regulation itself as the problem.  As for the Democrats, even the fiercest critics of Big Pharma shy away from questioning their motives when it comes to vaccines, and even recycle their favorite talking points.41,42 Meanwhile, as if in lockstep, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and various NPR radio and TV stations have likewise maintained a united front on the issue, uncritically accepting the alleged emergency as settled fact, stigmatizing "anti-vaxxers" as deluded or ignorant crazies, and declining to publish or give credence to dissenting views.43,44 Some like Congressman Adam Schiff have gone even further, directing Facebook and Google to censor all content opposing vaccines or questioning the mandates, in overt defiance of the First Amendment.45

Yet the politicians, the news media, and the general public deserve blame mainly for believing without questioning, for taking on faith what they're being told by medical and and scientific "experts" in a position to know, that vaccines are safe and effective, that the science is settled, that the emergency is real, and that vaccinating everybody is the only solution.  In an ideal world, or even the well-functioning democracy that we habitually claim to be, we should be able to trust our doctors to know and speak the truth, and to be open to changing our minds when new facts are brought to light. The fact that we aren't shows that we continue to believe because we need to believe, because we want to have faith in the religion of modern medicine,46 even when it forbids the questions and doubts that true science requires.47

The jig is up.

In any case, a number of signs and portents lead me to prophesy that this topsy-turvy politics may be on the verge of total collapse.  The most obvious reason is the sheer aggressiveness of the campaign to enforce the stricter mandates, as if knowing that the end is near. A good example is the CDC's latest agenda item, Healthy People 2020, which seeks to extend the existing mandates to adults,48 and may well backfire, since having to stand in line and roll up their own sleeves might stimulate parents to think about vaccines in a new way, to walk the talk they now righteously impose on their children.

Another is the sheer number of vaccines that are out there, with all the boosters and multiple vaccines being given together at the same visit, which have meant and will continue to mean more and more casualties, each with his or her own little ecosystem of grieving parents, relatives, and friends, not to mention the skyrocketing costs of medical care and special education in the schools that must follow in their wake. 

Even though still largely "under the radar," unacknowledged as legitimate or vaccine-related by most doctors, hospitals, schools, and even some family members and friends, the sheer numbers of aggrieved parents convinced that vaccines were responsible have already mobilized a formidable online presence, demonstrated and testified before state legislatures, and even persuaded some of them to leave their religious and philosophical exemptions in place.  The increased number and volume of such casualties have also brought about a subtle change in the attitude of and coverage by the news media, including more objective reporting of anti-vaccination protests by nurses refusing to take the flu and Hep B shots that some hospitals are requiring as conditions of their employment,49 which suggests that the religious aspect may slowly be wearing thin and giving way.

Similarly, many of the women asserting the right to control their own bodies, whether by demanding access to abortions and birth control, or by exposing sexual abuse and harassment, will eventually want to have children, and will then have to fight for the right to

decide on what kind of health care to give them. Whether or not to vaccinate will thus finally, inevitably, and rightly come to be recognized as a woman's issue, a mother's issue, and ultimately a father's, too, one supremely worth demonstrating, protesting, and otherwise fighting for, engaging with politicians about, and even running for office themselves, to make it happen. 

So in the end it comes back to parents as the spearhead or leading edge for change. If the industry, the CDC, and most doctors are right that vaccines are truly safe, then those thousands upon thousands of aggrieved parents who claim that vaccines have killed or crippled their children and must live every day in the shadow of those tragedies, whatever may have caused them, must be either lying, deluded, ignorant, or stupid.

 Having cared for many such children over the years, I can attest to the fact that their parents are none of these.  By no means ignorant "anti-vaxxers," the derogatory term meant to ridicule and defame them, their only mistake was to have done exactly what they were told, and now they want answers -- to learn the truth about vaccines, and to insure that they be made as safe as possible: "ex-vaxxers" would be a more accurate label. 

After 52 years of practicing family medicine, I can also say with complete assurance what should have been obvious all along, that caring parents are much better judges of what really happened to their children than those giant multinationals who make and sell vaccines, profit so lavishly from them, and cannot even be sued for the tragedies that result.

Notes.

1. "Measles Elimination in the United States," CDC, cdc.gov, 2019.
2. "Graph of Reported Measles Cases, 1956-2008," College of Physicians of

       Philadelphia, historyofvaccines.org, 2015.

3. "Vaccine-Preventable Diseases: Measles," Mass.gov, 2019.
4. Ibid.
5. Cf., for example, Matson, D., et al., "Outbreak of Measles in a Fully-Vaccinated

      School Population," Pediatric Infectious Diseases12:292, 1993.

6. Cf. "Mumps Outbreak at Harvard," NBC News,April 2016.
7. Cf., for example, Payne, D., et al., "Sibling Transmission of Vaccine-Derived

      Rotavirus," Pediatrics 125:938, 2010, and Murti, M., et al., "Case of Vaccine-

      Associated Measles 5 Weeks Post-Immunisation," Eurosurveillance 18:12,

      2013.

8. Cf., for example, Althouse, B., and Scarpino, S., "Asymptomatic Transmission

      and the Resurgence of Bordetella pertussis," BMC Medicine 13:1186, 2015.

9. Cf., for example, Cantekin, E., Letter, New England Journal of Medicine

      344:1719, 2001, and Greninger, A., et al., "Enterovirus D-68 Strain Associated

      with Acute Flaccid Myelitis," Lancet Infectious Diseases 15:671, 2015.

10. Roy, F., et al., "Rapid Identification of Measles Virus Vaccine Genotype by Real-

     Time PCR," Journal of Clinical Microbiology, https://jcm.asm.org, 2017.

11. Cf., for example, Dauer, C., "Reported Whooping Cough Morbidity and

     Mortality in the United States," Public Health Report 58:661, 1943.

12. Cf., for example, "Varicella," American Academy of Pediatrics Brochure, 1996.
13. Cf., for example, Cantekin, op. cit.
14. Ibid.
15. Cf. Althouse and Scarpino, op. cit.; Martin, S., et al., "Pertactin-Negative

     Bordetella pertussis Strains," Clinical Infectious Diseases 60:223, 2015; and

     Long, G., et al., "Acellular Pertussis Vaccination Facilitates Bordetella

     parapertussis Infection," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological

     Sciences 10:1098, 2010.

16. Cf., for example, Vashisht, N., and Puliyel, J., "Polio Programme: Let Us Declare

     Victory and Move On," Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 9:1146, 2012.

17. Cf. Greninger, et al., op. cit.
18. Vide supra, notes 5, 6.
19. Cherry, J., "The New Epidemiology of Measles and Rubella," Hospital Practice,

      July 1980, p. 52 et seq.

20. Edmondson, M., et al., "Mild Measles and Secondary Vaccine Failure During a

     Sustained Outbreak in a Highly-Vaccinated Population," JAMA 263:2467, 1990.

21. Ibid.
22. T. O. vs. Secretary of HHS, VICP Claim #99-635V.
23. Dr. Peter Rost Interview, in Gardasil Documentary, One More Girl, posted by

      Arjun Walia, collective-evolution.com, July 2015.

24. Cf. vaccine package inserts, and "How Are Vaccines Evaluated for Safety?"

    insidevaccines.com.

25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Kessler, D., "Introducing MEDWatch," JAMA 269:2765, and "Guerilla RN,"

     communitybabycenter.com, October 22, 2015.

28. Holland, M., "Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation

     Program," Pace Environmental Law Review28:480, 2011.

29. Holland, M., and Krakow, R., "The Right to Legal Redress," Vaccine Epidemic,

     Holland, M., and Habakus, L., eds. Skyhorse, 2012, pp. 39-40.

30. Bruesewitz vs. Wyeth,2011.
31. Cf., for example, Moskowitz, R., Vaccines: aReappraisal, Skyhorse, 2017,

     Chapter 1, pp. 9-12.

32. Cf., for example, Albonico, H., et al., "Febrile Infectious Childhood Diseases and

     the History of Cancer Patients and Matched Controls," Medical Hypotheses  51:315, 1998.

33. Cf. Goldman, G., and Miller, N., "Relative Trends in Hospitalization and

     Mortality Among Infants by the Number of Vaccine Doses and Age," Human

     Experimental Toxicology 31:1012, 2012.

34. Cf. Glanz, J., et al., "A Population-Based Cohort Study of Under-Vaccination in

     8 Managed-Care Organizations across the United States," JAMA Pediatrics

     167:284, 2013.

35. "Recommended Immunization Schedule for Persons Age 0-18 Years," ACIP,

      cdc.gov/vaccines/acip, 2016.

36. "Recommended Adult Immunization Schedule," ACIP, cdc.gov/vaccines/acip,

       2016.

37. "Medicines in Development: Vaccines," Press Release, PhRMA, pharma.org,

      September 11, 2013.

38. Cf. Black, L., "Limiting Parents' Rights in Medical Decision-Making,"