By Jaclyn Gallucci on June 23rd, 2011

The 1952 polio epidemic was one of the largest and most frightening public health crises in the United States, with outbreaks in all 50 states. Of the nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left paralyzed. Until 1955, when New York City’s Dr. Jonas Salk introduced his vaccine, polio was a constant terror. When asked in a televised interview who owned the patent for the vaccine, Salk replied, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Well, times have changed. Now pharmaceutical companies are highly protective of their assets, because vaccines are not just medical breakthroughs, they are also big business. In fact, Salk’s vaccine went on to raise manufacturer Eli Lilly’s profit by 90 percent in 1956, bringing in a total of $13.7 million in revenue for the company, in addition to the millions it made other manufacturers of the time. Today, companies like Merck bring in billions by manufacturing vaccines for everything from chicken pox to the flu.

And, today, children who follow the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended schedule receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines—46 more doses than they did 30 years ago, and the highest amount given in any country in the world.

Parents, faced with a barrage of polarizing opinions and a handful of conflicting studies, remain in a constant search for definitive answers. But right now, there aren’t any.

A recent University of Michigan study found that 76 percent of parents rely on their pediatricians to make the decision.

Vaccine proponents and the medical community at large argue that vaccination is safe and that illnesses including pertussis (whooping cough), rubella and diphtheria—epidemics that once killed thousands every year—are now prevented by vaccination and the enforcement of government mandates requiring children to have certain vaccinations before they are allowed to attend school.

“Thanks to immunizations, diseases like polio that were once common, are now only distant memories for most Americans,” says the New York State Department of Health. “Today there are few visible reminders of the suffering, injuries and deaths caused by diseases that are now prevented with vaccines.”

Vaccine opponents, namely parent activists and a very small minority of doctors and scientists, argue that infant immune systems are too weak to handle these shots, and that the possible side effects of vaccination, including seizures, paralysis and death, are overlooked by pharmaceutical companies and are not worth the risk. These critics say vaccines can trigger developmental problems like autism.

“Selling vaccines is extremely profitable and the process of mandating vaccines is fraught with conflicts of interest,” Michael Belkin, father of a child who died post-vaccination, told health officials. “The business model of having the government mandate [that] everyone must buy your product is a monopolist’s delight.”

The vaccine argument has reached a stalemate, leaving the general public wondering whom they should believe. Meanwhile, parents across Long Island and the nation are faced with their first vaccination decision within hours of their infants’ birth—and, one way or the other, they need to make a choice.

GETTING VACCINATED IN NEW YORK STATE

The current U.S. childhood immunization schedule calls for 28 injections with 11 different vaccines against 15 different diseases by the time a child reaches 2 years of age—the first is the hepatitis B vaccine, normally given within 24 hours of birth. In New York State—unless a parent refuses the shot—newborn babies will receive that one-dose hepatitis B vaccination before they are released from the hospital.

Some ask why babies need to be vaccinated against a potentially deadly disease most prevalent in high-risk groups such as intravenous drug users and sexually promiscuous adults.

“Vaccinating persons engaged in high-risk behaviors, lifestyles or occupations before they become infected generally has not been feasible,” the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an adjunct of the CDC, declared in the 1991 mandate. “For example, programs directed at injecting drug users failed to motivate them to receive three doses of the vaccine… In the long term, universal infant vaccination would eliminate the need for vaccinating adolescents and high-risk adults.”

Simply put, it’s easier. It also provides a safety net for children born to mothers with hepatitis B—those who either don’t know they have the disease or whose test results are faulty.

“Routine vaccination at birth prevents these all too common mistakes from becoming tragedies,” states the Section of Epidemiology of Alaska in its public health recommendations.

But why the child of a mother who knows for certain she is hepatitis B negative still needs this vaccine is a question Belkin, whose newborn daughter died hours after she received her second hepatitis B vaccine, asked again, before Congress, more than a decade ago.

“My 5-week-old daughter, Lyla Rose, died within 16 hours of her hepatitis B vaccination, which she received because of the universal vaccination policy this Committee instituted in 1991,” Belkin testified before the ACIP in February 1999. “The NY Medical Examiner observed brain swelling at the autopsy but refused to record that or mention the hepatitis B vaccine Lyla received in the autopsy report. I hold each one of you who participated in the promulgation or perpetuation of that mandated newborn vaccination policy personally responsible for my daughter’s death.”

Lyla Rose Belkin’s official cause of death is listed as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), said her father, simply because there was no other specific reason for her death.

“SIDS is a diagnosis of exclusion…‘It wasn’t this, it wasn’t that, everything has been ruled out and we don’t know what it is,’” he continued. “A swollen brain is not SIDS.”

But a swollen brain is one of the documented reactions to any vaccination in medical literature, and a SIDS ruling for vaccination-related deaths is not uncommon, according to Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), who interviewed parents of babies who died suddenly after Diphtheria (DPT) vaccinations for her book DPT: A Shot in the Dark.

“The death certificates of many babies, who die shortly after vaccination, list Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS as the cause of death, which means that no specific symptoms or other reason for death could be found,” she comments in her webpage Barbara Speaks Out. “Most doctors continue to deny that vaccination is a risk factor for SIDS.”

But the Association of American Pediatricians (AAP), which represents 60,000 doctors across the United States, stands by the hepatitis B vaccine, saying negative reactions are a rarity.

“A vaccine, like any medicine, is capable of causing serious problems, such as severe allergic reactions,” states the AAP. “The risk of hepatitis B vaccine causing serious harm, or death, is extremely small. Getting hepatitis B vaccine is much safer than getting hepatitis B disease.”

Although the hepatitis B vaccine is required for children to enter daycare or school, it is not required to be given after birth, unless the mother tests positive for the disease herself. A parent has the right to refuse this shot and delay it for months—or years if they choose.

The same applies to other vaccinations as well. While the CDC has a “recommended schedule” for vaccination, parents are not required to comply with it by law. But the law does require that proof of these immunizations be shown upon entry to daycare or school (both public and private institutions).

According to the CDC-recommended schedule, beginning at 2 months of age, a child should receive three doses of diphtheria toxoid-containing vaccine, three doses of tetanus toxoid-containing vaccine and pertussis vaccine (combined), three doses of polio vaccine, one dose of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (combined), three doses haemophilus influenza type b vaccine, four doses of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, and the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine.

The AAP recommends that kids get combination vaccines, rather than single vaccines, “whenever possible” to help reduce the number of shots a child receives.

Because many parents were questioning the safety of the combination vaccines—after the now disgraced UK doctor Andrew Wakefield (more about him later) said this was a toxic cocktail—the vaccines were separated.

Parents had the option of giving the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine as three separate shots given weeks apart.

“If you give three viruses together, three live viruses, then you potentially increase the risk of an adverse event occurring, particularly when one of those viruses influences the immune system in the way that measles does,” Wakefield announced following his study.

But, due to a lack of demand, and no definitive studies showing high risks of the combined shot, the manufacturing of these separate vaccines was discontinued in 2009.

All in all, by the time a child enters school, she has received 18 to 22 vaccinations over four years. Of these vaccines, only the MMR shot has been studied in association with autism. Meanwhile, different vaccines contain different toxic ingredients and preservatives—including formaldehyde and aluminum—only one of which, the mercury-containing Thimerosal, has ever been tested in association with autism.

In 1999, in response to growing concern over a link between vaccination and autism, the AAP and the US Public Health Service recommended that Thimerosal be removed from vaccines “as soon as possible.”

By 2009, mercury had been phased out of all vaccines in the U.S. with the exception of certain influenza, meningococcal and tetanus vaccines.

But a study that same year by Stony Brook University Medical Center found that giving another shot, the hepatitis B vaccine, to newborn baby boys may triple the risk of developing an autism spectrum disorder.

“Boys who received the hepatitis B vaccine during the first month of life had 2.94 [times] greater odds for Autism Spectrum Disorder compared to later, or unvaccinated, boys,” the study reported. “Findings suggest that U.S. male neonates vaccinated with hepatitis B vaccine had a three-fold greater risk of ASD; risk was greatest for non-white boys.”

This study was among the first university studies to suggest an association between vaccines and autism. Does that mean that hepatitis B vaccine causes autism? Not exactly, but it shows a possibility.

“It is unscientific and perilously misleading for anyone to assert that vaccines and autism have been studied and that no link has been found,” writes health author and journalist David Kirby. “That’s because the 16 or so studies constantly cited by critics of the hypothesis have examined just one vaccine and one vaccine ingredient.”

THE POWER OF ONE

Congress recognized that vaccines may have the ability to injure and kill children in 1986, when it passed the National Vaccine Injury Act, in response to a large number of lawsuits being filed claiming vaccines were causing adverse reactions including brain damage and death. The act serves to compensate victims and to protect medical professionals and vaccine manufacturers from liability if an individual suffered injury from receiving vaccines. This means doctors and pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued for injuries resulting from their products, and the government will essentially pay victims in the event an injury can be proven in connection with a vaccine.

“Exactly 25 years ago, in May 1986, I joined with mothers and fathers whose babies died after DPT shots and gave a presentation to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta,” says the National Vaccine Information Center’s Fisher. “We told physician members of the CDC’s vaccine policy-making committee, who wanted state legislators to strictly enforce laws legally requiring children to get 23 doses of seven vaccines starting at 2 months through age 6, that doctors did not really know how many children were dying after vaccination.”

More than 300,000 cases of adverse reactions to vaccines have been reported to the federal government since then, including permanent, life-threatening disabilities, illnesses and death. Since 1988, the government has awarded compensation to more than 1,300 families whose children suffered brain damage from vaccines, totaling more than $2 billion.

“You can read the transcript of that 1986 CDC meeting on NVIC’s website and decide for yourself whether anything has really changed in 25 years,” she says. “Except the fact that, now, public health officials are ordering doctors to give children 48 doses of 14 vaccines starting on day of birth through age 6, with half of those doses given before age 1.”

For parents attempting to avoid these shots altogether, they have few options if their child doesn’t have a medical reason for exemption: homeschooling or God.

I FOUGHT THE LAW…

In the United States today, patients’ and parents’ rights on mandatory vaccination varies from state to state. All 50 states offer exemptions on one of at least three grounds—medical, religious or philosophical. In New York, exemption is based purely on medical or religious grounds.

“Immunization requirements shall not apply to children whose parent, parents, or guardian hold genuine and sincere religious beliefs which are contrary to the practices herein required,” states New York law.

In some states a signed letter is all that is needed, but in New York, if parents want a religious exemption, a sincerity hearing is required.

“It is not sufficient merely that the beliefs that they assert as grounds for exemption be religious in nature,” the law continues. “It must also be demonstrated that the espoused beliefs are sincerely held.”

In other words, you can’t change religions just to escape immunization laws in New York State.

Sherr v. Northport-East Northport Union Free School District was a 1986 case brought by Alan Sherr, a Long Island doctor who didn’t want to immunize his kids. Sherr now runs the holistic health care practice, Northport Wellness Center.

“I tried to create an opportunity to not vaccinate my kids,” Sherr told the Press in 2009. Sherr’s anti-vaccination stance was grounded in his scientific and medical background and beliefs. At that time there was no religious sincerity exemption; a parent had to belong to a recognized religious group like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Christian Scientists. Sherr decided to join a “mail order” religious group, the Missionary Temple at Large, Universal Religious Brotherhood. The school district didn’t buy it and neither did the court. Their request for exemption was denied.

“Although the Sherrs’ voiced resistance to vaccination is no doubt sincere, their claims of a sincerely religious basis for their objections to inoculation are not credible,” stated the judge.

But the Sherrs’ fight did change the law. The court found that New York’s limitation of the religious exemptions “violated both the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment.” The law was changed to a third option: religious sincerity—it doesn’t matter what religion you practice, if it is recognized or not, as long as you are sincere in your beliefs.

Why all the trouble? Why not let those who want their children vaccinated be vaccinated—and those who don’t face the consequences?

It’s not so simple, says the medical community.

“When a large percentage of a population is vaccinated against a pathogen, the entire community—both those vaccinated and unvaccinated—receive additional protection,” states Ben Kleifgen, Temple University School of Medicine and Justin Silpe, University of Michigan, both contributors on VaccineEthics.org. “This concept, known as ‘herd immunity,’ is a primary justification for mandatory vaccination policies in the United States.”

This means that an unvaccinated child can not only get sick, but she can infect a vaccinated child, with a deadly disease, or act as a carrier.

In fact, just this week on Long Island, 13 children in the Smithtown school district were said to be infected with pertussis or whooping cough.

Health officials said June 21 that all 13 had been vaccinated against the disease and therefore had milder cases (no vaccine is 100 percent effective).

Pertussis is a highly contagious bacterial infection that causes an uncontrollable, violent cough lasting several weeks or even months.

“The most effective control measure is maintaining the highest possible level of immunization in the community,” says Dr. Kathy Thompson, director of Communicable Diseases for Suffolk County.

Suffolk County Health Commissioner Dr. James Tomarken says whooping cough has become more common in recent years.

“While most individuals will recover fully from pertussis, we are concerned about infants who have not received full immunization and to whom pertussis is particularly dangerous and can be fatal,” he says.

For those on the pro-vaccination side, this kind of herd immunity is one more substantial reason why immunization is necessary. Besides, in 2010, Dr. Wakefield, who produced the most influential study connecting autism and vaccination turned out to be a fabricated hoaxer, didn’t he?

…AND THE LAW WON (FOR NOW)

On Feb. 2, 2010, the British Medical journal Lancet retracted Wakefield’s influential peer-reviewed 1998 study, which first linked vaccines with autism, claiming the study had failed to have its child subjects approved by an ethics committee. The journal called it “an elaborate fraud.” Wakefield had his medical license revoked three months later for “serious professional misconduct” stemming from the retracted study.

Wakefield contends that the investigation of his work is part of a conspiracy to “discredit and silence his research” in order to “shield the government from exposure on the vaccine scandal” and “to crush any attempt to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns.”

It may sound far-fetched, but looking a little closer, some believe that theory isn’t all that unbelievable.

Thirty years ago, the vaccine market consisted of 35 vaccine manufacturers in the United States. Today, nearly all vaccines on the worldwide market are produced by just a handful of pharmaceutical companies: GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, Pfizer and Wyeth.

With the passing of the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act, which protects vaccine manufacturers against liability, these companies have gone on to create new vaccines with catchy ad campaigns like Gardasil’s “One Less” slogan.

Right now strep throat vaccines are also being tested, and Merck’s relatively new chickenpox vaccine (varicella) has already been added to the CDC-recommended childhood vaccine schedule, which some claim is no coincidence.

“The American Academy of Pediatrics, a major supporter of mandatory chickenpox and other vaccine mandates across the country, shares incestuous financial ties with Merck,” says Kristine M. Severyn, PhD, a registered pharmacist, in an editorial to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. “Profitable well-baby visits are timed to coincide with vaccination schedules established by the AAP and the CDC… The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group of individuals hand-picked by the CDC, recommends which vaccines are administered to American children…Federal vaccine funds can be denied to states which do not ‘vigorously enforce’ mandatory vaccination laws. Conversely, the CDC offers financial bounties to state departments of health for each ‘fully-vaccinated’ child.”

Adding further proof of the close-knit relationship between Big Pharma and government agencies, CDC director Julie Gerberding was hired by Merck in 2010 to head its vaccine division—one year after she left the post of CDC director, the minimum waiting time for taking a position with a CDC-regulated business.

“She will be responsible for the commercialization of the current portfolio of vaccines, planning for the introduction of vaccines from the company’s robust vaccine pipeline, and accelerating Merck’s ongoing efforts to broaden access to its vaccines in the developing world,” the 2009 announcement reads.

Merck currently markets at least 12 of the CDC-recommended vaccines, as well as Gardasil.

And if there is any doubt that vaccines are big business, three major vaccination manufacturers made the Fortune 500 list in 2011. Pfizer came in at #31, with a profit of $8.2 billion for the previous year, Merck at #53 with a profit of $861 million, and Eli Lilly at #115 with profits of $5.1 billion.

While neither these relationships nor profits negate the value of vaccinations—nor do either of these things prove immunization dangerous—they do raise the question that, in the event there is something to hide, is it being directly covered up or are these companies and government merely not seeking answers to questions they don’t want answers to?

Actress and autism advocate Jennifer McCarthy defended Wakefield in a blog post in January, asking, “Why does one journalist’s accusations against Dr. Wakefield now mean the vaccine-autism debate is over?”

“I know children regress after vaccination because it happened to my own son,” she continued. “Why aren’t there any tests out there on the safety of how vaccines are administered in the real world, six at a time? Why have only two of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism?”

The federal government continues to be the largest buyer of vaccines in the country, administering these vaccines through government-funded public immunization programs that provide millions of vaccines to babies each year.

On Aug. 27, 2010 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled once again that there is no link between vaccination and autism in the case of Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services. The decision upheld two earlier rulings stating the same thing.

On Feb. 22, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth that vaccine-injury claims must continue to be filed with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims set up under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, and cannot be filed directly against physicians or vaccine manufacturers in civil court.

Vaccine opponents have very few options—barring a medical or religious exemption—if they want their children to attend school. But they can consider an alternative vaccination schedule and postpone required shots until their children are more developed.

Dr. Salk’s last years were spent searching for a vaccine against HIV. Today those studies continue, but so do studies for vaccines against much less serious illnesses like strep throat, leaving many to not only wonder how big the risks are but, at what point do we draw the line? And who will draw it?

“If the State can tag, track down and force citizens against their will to be injected with biologicals of known and unknown toxicity today, there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the State can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow,” says Fisher.

But the ACIP insists that foregoing scheduled immunizations is a coin toss.

“If you decide not to immunize your child, you put your child at risk,” states the ACIP. “You need to get all the scientific facts from a medical professional you can trust before making any decisions based on stories you may have seen or heard on TV, the Internet, or from other parents.”

Vaccine critic Dr. T.B. Allison said more than a century ago, in an 1883 conference on vaccination safety, that doctors, as a rule, believe in vaccination because they know no other way. Right, wrong or somewhere in between, it’s what they have been taught.

“Be fair, therefore, to the doctors, and ask yourselves whether you would not believe as they do, and act as they do, if your training and interest coincided with theirs,” the doctor said. “We believe our teachers. I never heard of anti-vaccinators except as fools and fanatics, whose existence was marvelous. My aim has been to show that you have a powerful body to fight in the medical profession. We cannot be stirred without great effort. We are a kind of Juggernaut; we have to be dragged; we will not go. Let each one take his doctor, or, if he be so fortunate as not to need one, the doctor who lives nearest to him, and try and instruct him. Send him the literature of the subject; he may not read it—but he may.”