Chronic Illness Epidemic: Unvaccinated Children Healthier

"There are 33 doses of 9 different vaccines that our children now have to get to attend school. There are 200 vaccines being created, including an AIDS vaccine that Dr. Halsey said she be used by all 12 year olds. The issue is not whether or not we should use a few vaccines to control a few serious diseases but whether or not we are over-vaccinating our children and setting them up for chronic disease later in life.....parents should be fully informed about all risks and then be able to make an informed consent decision. The issue is whether we are going to have the right in this country as Americans to freely choose the kind of preventive health care we want for our families, including which vaccines we use, or whether we are going to have that right taken from us by public health officials.....we do not know if all these vaccines were are giving our children are contributing to chronic disease later in life. We are becoming a sicker and sicker society." - Barbara Loe Fisher, The Today Show, January 1997 (Live debate with Neal Halsey, M.D.)

"The committee was unable to address the concern that repeated exposure of a susceptible child to multiple immunizations over the developmental period may also produce atypical or non-specific immune or nervous system injury that could lead to severe disability or death. (Fisher, 2001) There are no epidemiological studies to address this. Thus, the committee recognizes with some discomfort that this report addresses only part of the overall set of concerns of some of those most wary about the safety of childhood immunization." - Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, Multiple Immunizations and Immune Dysfunction (2002)

"Surveys were mailed to 2964 member households of the National Vaccine Information Center, which represents people concerned about vaccine safety, to ascertain vaccination and atopic disease status. The data included 515 never vaccinated, 423 partially vaccinated, and 239 completely vaccinated children. In multiple regression analyses there were significant (P < .0005) and dose- dependent negative relationships between vaccination refusal and self-reported asthma or hay fever only in children with no family history of the condition and, for asthma, in children with no exposure to antibiotics during infancy. Vaccination refusal was also significantly (P < .005) and negatively associated with self-reported eczema and current wheeze. A sensitivity analysis indicated that substantial biases would be required to overturn the observed associations. - Enriques R, Addington W, et al, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (April 2005)

"The number of American children with chronic illnesses has quadrupled since the time when some of their parents were kids, portending more disability and higher health costs for a new generation of adults, a study estimates. An almost fourfold increase in childhood obesity in the past three decades, twice the asthma rates since the 1980s, and a jump in the number of attention-deficit disorder cases are driving the growth of chronic illnesses, according to researchers at Harvard University in Boston. The report is published in a this month's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association focusing on children's health..... In 1960, just 1.8 percent of U.S. children and adolescents were reported to have a chronic health condition that limited their activities. In 2004, the rate rose to 7 percent, researchers said. `"We will see much greater expenditures for people in their 20s than we ever saw before, and no one is thinking how we should prepare for that,'' said James Perrin, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the report's lead author, in an interview. "We call it an epidemic. It's certainly worrisome and we look at it as a call to action.'' - Angela Zimm, Bloomberg News Service, June 2007

"A new, privately funded survey finds vaccinated U.S. children have a significantly higher risk of neurological disorders -- including autism -- than unvaccinated children. In one striking finding, vaccinated boys 11-17 were more than twice as likely to have autism as their never-vaccinated counterparts. The telephone survey of parents representing a total of 17,000 children appears to be the first of its kind -- and contrasts starkly with several government-backed studies that have found no risk from vaccines. "No one has ever compared prevalence rates of these neurological disorders between vaccinated and unvaccinated children," said J.B. Handley, father of a child with autism and co-founder of Generation Rescue, which commissioned the $200,000 survey conducted by SurveyUSA, a respected marketing firm. "The phone survey isn't perfect, but these numbers point to the need for a comprehensive national study to gather this critical information." - Dan Olmsted, UPI, June 2007


Barbara Loe Fisher Commentary:

This past week, the results of two studies were released which supports several decades of mounting evidence that an epidemic of chronic brain and immune system disorders has developed among American children in the past quarter century and that the use of multiple doses of multiple vaccines given to children early in life may play a major role. These two new studies, one conducted by researchers at Harvard University and one conducted by Generation Rescue, reinforce findings of an asthma study conducted by researchers at University of Illinois, Chicago published in 2005. All three studies validate the repeated warnings since the early 1990's by parents of vaccine injured children that over-vaccination of infants and toddlers may be contributing to increases in learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, asthma, diabetes and autism among older children.

While the Harvard study confirmed the existence of a chronic disease and disability epidemic among American children, including a prevalence of six percent of all children with ADHD and nine percent with asthma, it was the $200,000 private funding of a west coast telephone survey by Generation Rescue founder JB Handley which revealed a much higher risk of neurological disorders in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children that deserves special attention and immediate follow-up. The survey found that "Among more than 9,000 boys age 4-17, vaccinated boys were 2.5 times (155 percent) more likely to have neurological disorders, 224 percent more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 61 percent more likely to have autism."

This evidence reinforces information published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2005 that there are marked differences between the incidence of self-reported asthma in vaccinated and unvaccinated children by parents, with a finding that parents of unvaccinated children were "11 times less likely to report asthma" and "10 times less likely to report hay fever" among children with no family history of either condition. NVIC staff worked for four years with researchers at the University of Illinois to design and implement the study entitled "The Relationship between Vaccine Refusal and Self-Report of Atopic Disease in Children." The study methodology, which included the formal Institutional Review Board (IRB) process and peer review, involved mailing of surveys to 2,964 randomly selected households of members of NVIC with children aged 3 to 18 years, a database which includes families with highly vaccinated, partially vaccinated and totally unvaccinated children.

These studies follow three congressionally mandated reports in 1991 and 1994 published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Sciences, which reviewed the medical literature and confirmed that vaccines can cause brain and immune system dysfunction as well as death. When, at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, the Institute of Medicine convened another committee of physicians to examine scientific evidence that vaccines cause brain and immune system dysfunction, I made the following statement at a January 2001 IOM public workshop:

"There is a compelling argument to be made that the dramatic increase in chronic brain and immune dysfunction in children, especially the rising number of reports of regression in previously healthy children, is due to an early exposure that is being experienced by all children but which is harming an expanding minority of them.... Many biological responses are at least partially under genetic control. If, for example, adverse responses to vaccination are tied to the genes responsible for predisposition to autoimmunity and immune-mediated neurological dysfunction, then it is possible that the addition of more doses of vaccines to the routine schedule in the past two decades has affected more and more children with that genetic predisposition.....Therefore, when all children only were exposed to DPT and polio vaccine in the early 1960's, a tiny fraction of the genetically susceptible responded adversely. But with the addition of measles, mumps and rubella to the routine schedule in 1979, and then HIB, hepatitis B and chicken pox in the late 1980's and 1990's, far more of the genetically susceptible have been brought into the adverse responder group."
http://www.nvic.org/Loe_Fisher/blftestimony_iom_safety.htm

In their 2002 published report on "Multiple Immunizations and Immune Dysfunction" the Institute of Medicine stated:

"The committee was unable to address the concern that repeated exposure of a susceptible child to multiple immunizations over the developmental period may also produce atypical or non-specific immune or nervous system injury that could lead to severe disability or death. (Fisher, 2001) There are no epidemiological studies to address this. Thus, the committee recognizes with some discomfort that this report addresses only part of the overall set of concerns of some of those most wary about the safety of childhood immunization." ( http://www.iom.edu/CMS/3793/4705/4432.aspx)

Scientifically confirming that the repeated atypical manipulation of the immune system with multiple vaccines in early childhood is contributing to chronic disease and disability increases would require additional methodologically sound epidemiological studies as well as basic science research into the different biological mechanisms involved in vaccine induced brain and immune system dysfunction. Future studies comparing groups of vaccinated to groups of unvaccinated children and adults should include not only evaluation of all morbidity and mortality outcomes but also identify genetic variability and measure pathological changes at the cellular and molecular level in the vaccinated and unvaccinated, including changes in immune function (blood tests), brain function (EEG, MRI) and chromosomal integrity over a 10 to 20 year period.

In 1982, parents of DPT vaccine injured children began urging federal health agencies, vaccine manufacturers and doctors to take seriously the reports of health deterioration after vaccination. We begged them to responsibly investigate the persistent reports by parents that healthy children were regressing physically, mentally and emotionally and being left with a variety of brain and immune system problems. Those warnings, which became more urgent in the 1990's, were ignored. Now the child chronic illness epidemic, which we predicted would occur if our warnings were ignored is here.

It is a sad commentary on the state of the public health that so many American children are so sick and there are still so many gaps in scientific knowledge about the ways that vaccines act in the human body to stimulate long term immunity or cause injury and death. The stubborn reluctance of government, industry and medicine to acknowledge the validity of reports by parents that children are getting sicker not healthier, despite using so many vaccines, may turn out to be the greatest medical scandal and human tragedy of the past century.