(The purpose of this blog series - and all other blogs I do -is to educate the public, using medical literature which the medical profession has, but does not usually provide to parents, to show parents that there is other information you need to know in order to make an informed choice about vaccination. Remember, this is medical information, not "opinion".). You would think, wouldn't you, that before developing a whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine, scientists would actually understand what constitutes immunity, and how the immune system responds to the whooping cough bacteria. Right? Wrong. In terms of defining how immunity developed, the twentieth century could best be described as "flying blind"... because the only "obsession" was with "antibodies" in the blood. It was assumed that antibodies was all a person needed to provide whooping cough immunity, and nothing else mattered.Immunologists did not realise that their understanding of pertussis immunity was fatally flawed, or that they didn't know enough. As Leef 2000 says:
By 2000, Leef also knew that:
and
Most infections occured by the age of 12 Fine 84:
Even in 1984, the evidence showed that:
Young mothers in the 1980's, were told that the more people who had the vaccine, the smaller numbers of susceptible people would be around (herd immunity) and whooping cough would die out. Yet as Fine 84 states, they already knew, even then, that that wasn't the case:
That fact is born out by New Zealand data.
What has gone wrong? A more recent study, Wearing 09 postulated that naturally immunity was around 30 years:
More importantly in this context, was the fact that natural immunity (not vaccine induced immunity) results in very young babies being protected via their mothers. As Bass 89 said:
However, efforts to prove that mothers could give their babies protection came unstuck because of the assumption that antibodies were what "constituted" protection, though the possibility that they were wrong about antibodies, was understood in February 1943 when Dr Cohen published the results of a study on mothers and babies. Forty-nine years later in 2005, the problem had still not been resolved when Rie stated:
It was also shown that contrary to natural immunity the current vaccines provide extremely limited protectionFeunou 10 says:
Even worse, was this study by Srugo 2000 which showed that:
Right now, we hear the words of the NZ experts who are now saying, "Oh but if you vaccinate, your child will have a milder infection." Really? Here's a problem. Sweden, which has the best diagnostic and notification system in the world, says THEY only report one per 1,000 infections Hallander 2012, because the majority are so mild. Is New Zealand doing better than Sweden? I doubt it. If the medical profession isn't recognising, let along reporting all infections, and they don't see, or know about all the mild cases there are across the unvaccinated community then how can the New Zealand Ministry of Health's comment about the vaccine in Sweden being so effect..., be considered accurate science?
All over New Zealand, the parents of unvaccinated children tell me their kids aren't nearly as sick as the vaccinated kids. But perhaps that's because people who chose not to vaccinate, know how to treat whooping cough?
And....isn't the point of a vaccination programme, to stop the spread - to provide herd immunity - to protect the vulnerable? If the whooping cough vaccines have such limited protection, and are also changing the epidemiology... what might be the consequences?
Exactly what we are seeing now, which was predicted nearly 25 years ago, when Bass 89 stated:
Okay, so just booster the adolescents right? And the pregnant mothers and everyone around them? as per cocooning? Shouldn't that protect the wee babies?
On 12 July, 2007, this ad appeared on Google, slap bang in the middle of reading a USA newspaper article on the Afghanistan war:
But as Levine 12 says, "almost no data has been published on its utility in preventing infant cases". As Australia has discovered this year...., the "cocooning" method and vaccinating mothers, doesn't appear to work. So Australia abandoned the vaccination of everyone close to the baby.
Why aren't the current ever growing raft of vaccine boosters working? One reason might be as stated in Weingart 2000:
But why wouldn't booster doses cause the body to kill invading bacteria? There are two reasons. The first is described by James Cherry in 2004 and is called the possible problem "original antigenic sin:"
The vaccine creates back end antibodies, BUT natural infection requires a specific bronchial immunity not made by the current vaccines, and not provided by the antibodies detected in antibody tests.
In adults, booster shots don't work. As Weingart 2000 showed:
Why is this?Cherry 2010 explains when he revisits this little problem:
Which is why vaccinated people can't clear the bacteria from the bronchi and therefore become carriers if infected, and THEN can act as a reservoir to infect others. They do not respond to the key toxins which arise as A PROCESS of infection. Cherry is simply implying that vaccine immune people when re-infected with whooping cough, do not clear the bacteria, which was confirmed in a study four years before. (Weingart 2000 clearance).
While the New Zealand Ministry of Health letter stated that our vaccines had an 84% efficacy, that statement was based on page 141 in the 2011 handbook, which referenced two studies using 1992 data (Greco 96, Salmaso 2001), which proposed an effectiveness of accellular vaccine at 84% and the old whole cell vaccine (Pw) at 36%. But a new study (Skerry 11) says:
Which fits in with the nasty little Korobeinikov 03 study (which the MOH ignores) which gave our vaccine an efficacy of 33%. Some vaccine.
More interestingly, the article they now quote for aP efficacy of 84%, showed whole cell pertussis wP with an efficacy of 36%.Have a look at the tables on page 2 of this Blakely 99 article which lays out the "efficacy" of the whole cell vaccines in NZ. Vastly "higher" than 36%.You begin to wonder if they know what they are talking about. Worse, who knows what the official efficacy of the current whooping cough aP vaccine being used in New Zealand, will be set at, some time in the future?!!! Zero percent?
The 84% efficacy data quoted by the New Zealand Ministry of Health, from data collected in1992, does not take into account the genetic shift in whooping cough bacteria, which has been sweeping the world since that time. It would seem that the Ministry of Health is stuck in a time warp.
The missing key is this:
Natural mucosal immunity specifically targets the infection process - how the bacteria sets up shop - and the specific toxins the bacteria switch on and then start once their little claws attach to the cilia in the bronchi at "ground zero". The current vaccine doesn't target any of those antigens, because they are switched on and excreted as part of the process of infection. Those toxins or antigens.... are NOT the antigens used to make the vaccine, and even if they were the correct antibodies to prevent infection, they would only be any usey use if they travelled to the bronchi, rather than slouch around in the blood.
To use a term loosely, the current whooping cough vaccines create antibodies at the "back-end", to antigens which come later in the infection. Vaccine MIGHT reduce disease severity for the few months those antibodies exist, but the current whooping cough vaccines don't create the powerful "front end" protection which will immediately clear the bacteria on re-infection.
The vaccine antibodies, if they are around, might ... lessen the effect of pertussis toxin when it hits the blood supply. But that's only a supposition, because when our unvaccinated toddlers got whooping cough, the doctor couldn't understand why it was they were far less ill than all the vaccinated children in his practice were.
For a broader understanding of the implications of original antigenic sin and the creation of incorrect immunity which can't be reversed, please read this chapter from FOPTA, which explains the research in more detail.
The proper natural mucosal immunity, which effectively clears out bacteria and prevents infection, is now being defined by a "new breed" of scientists, and this is what they are finding.Feunou 10 again:
Same author different paper:
Let me repeat:
The current vaccines don't give the same type of protection as natural infection.
Whooping cough vaccines have been used for over half a century, and the last thing the medical profession needs you to know, is that not only do they not work in the way they assumed that they would, but that the vaccines have actually made whooping cough epidemiology much worse for babies.
If parents twigged that they had been sold a dud vaccine and been sucked in to "effective" (not) boosters for eternity..., they might ask a whole lot of very nasty questions, not just about the whooping cough vaccines, but about others as well.
The "experts" know that the "old" vaccine has caused major issues, and they know that a new different vaccine is needed to fix those problems, but they also know that they can't tell you that.
Their search for an intranasal vaccine, started in the year 2000.
The medical profession's way around not having to explain to the public that they've screwed the overall deal - looks to be to introduce a new intranasal whooping cough vaccine at birth, as an ADJUNCT to the existing raft of jabs - sort of like Feunou's suggestion here:
What a nifty idea... just slide it in at birth and keep everything else as it was. Don't rock the boat.
Presumably the acellular injection would provide boosted rounded immunity to someone primed the right way, with the BPZE1 intranasal vaccine???....., but that has yet to be proven.
The medical profession will slide this new vaccine in at birth as a political face-saving adjunct, telling parents that the intranasal squirt up the nose, is just a little adjunct to tide the newborn over until they can put in the rest of the "normal" scheduled whooping cough injections. That "little adjunct" allows the present manufacturers of the old ones to keep on making lot of money, while the public still believes the old myths, and remains none the wiser to the fact... that the old vaccines created several major problems.
In reality the intranasal one - should it work - should be the ONLY vaccine used.
But one problem will remain. Everyone whose FIRST immunity came from an injected vaccine which cannot develop proper immunity or prevent infection or carriage, will not respond to an intranasal vaccine given later, and until those people die, those adults will be the main source of carriage and spread in the community.
The intranasal vaccine will be of no use to adults, whose immunity - as a result of "original antigenic sin" was primed for "back end" immunity and whose immune system will no longer respond in any other way - so an intranasal vaccine won't give front end immunity to adults, any more than re-exposure to whooping cough would, or booster injections will. Given that booster shots don't increase the bactericidal qualities in the blood why recommend them?
Furthermore the accellular vaccine Long 10, increases the susceptibility to parapertussis forty fold - in mice. It is postulated that some of the "increase" in whooping cough is actually parapertussis, driven by the acellular vaccines in the first place. But whose really looking at that? No-one. It's too dangerous to be accurately informed by also studying trends in humans, not just mice.
IF the medical profession would be prepared to admit the above, this is what they would have to say.
"We got it all wrong. Our ideas on immunity to whooping cough were flawed; the vaccine we developed caused the wrong sort of immunity which is very short lived. This resulted in lots of older children, adolescents and adults having the wrong sort of immunity. While they didn't get serious disease, they couldn't clear the bacteria like naturally immune people can, therefore they became carriers and spread infection through the community which is why whooping cough is now uncontrolled. Because we've messed with maternal immunity that has resulted in an increase in the numbers of under-ones being hospitalised,
However, we think that we can replicate natural immunity with an intranasal vaccine, which has long term immunity, and if that works, we might be able to give long term immunity with a single dose up the nose - maybe every 20 years."
Such a statement will never be made - you can guarantee that.
This information, publishely out in the open in the medical literature (presumably where they don't think you will look) puts a completely different slant on the information currently being handed out by the Ministry of Health, but is crucial for you to know in order to make informed choices.
