Vaccine Injuries

Documented Adverse Reactions to Vaccines

Lou Conte, Tony Lyons

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781632201706
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Gesundheitspolitik

Reveals the truth behind the controversial issue of vaccine-related injuries. Proponents declare that vaccines have saved millions of lives. Critics claim that the success is overstated and that vaccines may even be dangerous. Many consider mandatory vaccinations a violation of individual rights or religious principles. Many in public health argue that vaccine mandates are critical and justified and that antivaccination sentiment has resulted in outbreaks of preventable childhood illnesses. Vaccine critics point to mainstream medicine's denial of and underreporting of vaccine injury.Vaccine injuries have happened in the past and continue to happen today, and neither the mainstream medical establishment nor the government has ever fully and transparently addressed the issue of vaccine injury. In the 1980s, the United States addressed individual cases of vaccine injury by establishing the NVICP—the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program—a controversial Department of Health and Human Services program. The NVICP was intended to be "non-adversarial, compassionate, and generous" to vaccine-injury victims. However, many vaccine-injury victims and safety advocates believe that the program is not functioning as intended. There are also concerns that the program is keeping the reality of vaccine injury from public inspection. Vaccine Injuries, a groundbreaking book in the field, reveals cases of vaccine injury from the NVICP—something that has never been offered to the public—and lets readers asses vaccine injuries for themselves.

PART I

1

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Vaccination has always been controversial. Proponents declare that vaccines have saved millions of lives, while critics claim that their success has been overstated and that vaccines may even be dangerous for some people. Many consider mandatory vaccinations a violation of individual rights or religious principles. Many in public health argue that vaccine mandates are justified and that anti-vaccination sentiment has reduced uptake rates in certain communities, resulting in outbreaks of preventable, and sometimes fatal, childhood illnesses. Opponents of vaccination point out that serious “vaccine preventable diseases” declined in severity and frequency before mass vaccination commenced due to better living conditions and the effectiveness of modern sanitation engineering.

The reality of vaccine injury has been horribly mishandled by the medical establishment for two hundred years, as we shall show. Denial, secrecy, and persecution of those who raise concerns about vaccine safety continue to this day. Are vaccines really safe and effective? Are the successes overstated? Are other public health initiatives more effective? Are vaccines acceptable to people with unique religious traditions? Are they contaminated? Do they sometimes spread the diseases they seek to prevent? Are they being over-used, and are severe diseases being replaced by vaccine-induced chronic diseases and conditions?

The fact is that vaccine injuries have happened in the past and continue to happen today. Even though reliance on vaccines has increased, mainstream medicine has never fully and transparently addressed the reality of vaccine injury. We must recognize that vaccines are drugs, and the more drugs one takes, the more numerous the adverse reactions to those drugs will be.

In the 1980s the United States addressed individual cases of vaccine injury by establishing the NVICP—the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program—a controversial Department of Health and Human Resources program. The NVICP was intended to be “non-adversarial, compassionate and generous” to vaccine injury victims. However, as we write this book, Congress is considering hearings on the effectiveness of the NVICP. Many vaccine injury victims and vaccine safety advocates believe that the program is not functioning as Congress intended. The concern is that the NVICP is not an open and fair justice forum. There are also concerns that the program is keeping the reality of vaccine injury away from public inspection. While some (but perhaps not all) case decisions are posted on the United States Court of Claims website, most people don’t know that the NVICP even exists.

We intend to publish Vaccine Injuries annually. Each year’s book will feature all of the reported case decisions, by filing date, that resulted in the decision to compensate. While we have edited these cases for readability, we feel that these reported decisions, which may be referenced for legal purposes, provide an invaluable insight into the nature of vaccine injury and how the NVICP actually works. These case decisions are not easy reading. Vaccine injury can result in death and suffering. As these are public documents and petitioners have the right to file motions to redact personal information before the cases are posted, we have not removed case names. However, we ask the reader to respect the privacy of the litigants, their doctors, and expert witnesses.

We will also publish a sampling of unreported compensated cases. These cases, while public, are not reference material for legal purposes. Publishing all of the compensated cases of vaccine injury in the unreported section of the website would be excessive.

To place the current cases in context and to shed light on how the NVICP has evolved, we will also feature selected historical decisions.

The vast majority of cases filed in the NVICP do not result in compensation, as the 2013 statistical report shows.

Historically, the majority of claims have been filed for varieties of diptheria, pertussis, and tetanus and varieties of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines. Most of these claims involved children whose alleged injuries were seizures and brain damage (encephalopathy). At the present time, the majority of cases compensated by the NVICP feature neurological injury to adults, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), from adverse reactions to various influenza vaccines. Of the 993 NVICP cases reported for 2013, 627 were dismissed and 366 were compensated. Petitioner award amounts totaled $254,666,326.70. Since 1988, 3,540 individuals have been compensated and $2,671,223,269.97 has been paid out to victims of vaccine injury.1

For those who have accepted the oft-repeated claim that vaccines are safe and effective, these numbers may be shocking. However, it is critical to note that these statistics do not reflect the fact that the vast majority of vaccine injuries are not even reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and that the vast majority of suspected injuries never result in NVICP filings.2

The statute of limitations for filing vaccine injury claims in the NVICP is three years. It is critical that those who claim vaccine injury have information at their fingertips so that they can act promptly.

We do not list attorney names—petitioner or respondent—in any of the cases, as we are not dispensing legal advice or providing advertising for attorneys. Be warned, however, that the burdens of acting pro se—on behalf of your self—in the NVICP are not to be underestimated. A list of the attorneys admitted to the bar of the program is available through the US Court of Claims website.3 Another good resource is the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), which also features a listing of attorneys and other valuable information.

We recognize that many will describe this book as “anti-vaccine”—a sophistic argument. Federal aviation officials who investigate airplane accidents are not “anti-air travel.” Aviation accidents result in notifications to pilots that explain the implications of these accidents. Consumers of vaccines deserve no less. Vaccines are drugs, and adverse drug reactions happen. Publicly disclosing them—as is often done on television drug commercials—allows consumers to make informed choices. Analyzing adverse drug reactions leads to safer drugs. This is our intention here.

Publication of compensated vaccine injury cases from the NVICP—something that has never been offered to the public—will allow the reader to assess vaccine injury. We hope our book serves as a jumping-off point for the reader’s investigation and analysis. We hope that the information provided here will lead to family discussions about vaccines and vaccine safety. We believe in informed consent and that individuals and parents, on behalf of their children, ought to have the final decision on medical choices.

2

A BRIEF HISTORY OF VACCINATION

It is important to acknowledge the devastation of disease outbreaks throughout human history. Smallpox killed an estimated three hundred to five hundred million people before the last recorded case in 1979. Typhoid fever, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diptheria, tuberculosis, and even diarrhea killed untold millions. Europe lingered in the Dark Ages for hundreds of years in no small part due to the Black Death, which killed anywhere between seventy-five and two hundred million.

Disease forever altered history in the Americas as well. Hidden Cities author Roger Kennedy claims that North America’s pre-Columbian civilization disappeared in what he termed “the Great Dying”—a plague that claimed an estimated thirty million lives due to the arrival of microbes from unknown pre-Columbian European visitors.1 The early American historical perspective of “an open continent” was possible only because the vast majority of indigenous people had been wiped out.

It wasn’t Hernando Cortez who defeated the Aztecs. It was smallpox, inadvertently transmitted by the conquistadors, that devastated the Aztec empire. Malaria has killed untold millions in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Disease has had catastrophic impacts on civilization.

The Romans suspected the importance of clean running water and personal hygiene. The Romans, like many in the ancient world, believed that “bad air”—miasma—caused disease. They designed their cities with this belief in mind. Aqueducts, sewers, and public baths were the response. It has been theorized that the fall of Rome—and the loss of Roman engineering—set the stage for the scourge of disease in the Western world.

It is not known when attempts to improve human immunity began, but it is believed that inoculation—often referred to as variolation—originated in eighth-century India. The practice involved taking exudates from a person infected with a mild case of smallpox and rubbing it into a cut on the skin of a non-infected person. The person receiving the treatment would become ill but would develop immunity to the more serious version of the disease.

Inoculation was considered by the British Royal Society in 1699 and discussed in the society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1714 and 1716. After observing the inoculation in Turkey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu became a champion for the technique in 1718—by publicly inoculating her children. A few years later, Edward Jenner would make the practice safer by inoculating his children with cowpox in order to protect people against smallpox.

In the new world, devastating smallpox outbreaks occurred throughout the 1600s and 1700s in New England. In Boston, the sick were often held under armed guard in “pest houses.” The smallpox mortality rate for New Englanders was near 30 percent.

The Reverend Cotton Mather was inoculation’s first American proponent when he learned of variolation from an African slave. Mather advocated for the practice during the smallpox outbreak of 1721. Mather publicly debated the issue with William Douglas, Boston’s only trained university physician. Douglas argued that inoculation—which involved direct transfers of bodily fluids—could spread smallpox that resulted in fatalities and could also spread other diseases as well, such as syphilis. These were valid criticisms of the primitive state of the technique. Douglas also felt that Mather was undermining medical authority by carrying out inoculations in haphazard fashion.

Mather, who lost his wife and children in a measles outbreak, regarded inoculations as a gift from God. Many, however, felt that the technique was an attempt to subvert the will of God and regarded it as a heathen practice. In his 1722 sermon entitled “The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation,” English theologian Reverend Edmund Massey argued that diseases are sent by God to punish sin and that any attempt to prevent smallpox via inoculation is a “diabolical operation.”

The debate was heated. Mather’s house was firebombed, apparently in response to his support for inoculation. Mather ultimately convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to experiment with variolation. Boylston experimented on his six-year-old son, his slave, and his slave’s son. Both contracted the disease and became “gravely ill” for several days before recovering. Boylston went on to inoculate thousands in Massachusetts.2

Ultimately, inoculation became more accepted through the work of Edward Jenner, who noted that English milk maids didn’t seem to contract smallpox and theorized that this was because they contracted non-lethal cowpox from milking cows. Jenner pioneered a new type of inoculation called “vaccination”—a word derived from the Latin word for cow—vacca. Jenner took cowpox virus from a cow and injected it into humans, the result being immunity from smallpox. Eventually, vaccination was embraced, and in 1840, the British government provided vaccination free of charge. Variolation was replaced by vaccination and ultimately banned. Jenner became known as the “father of immunology.”

Many of America’s founding fathers supported inoculation and, subsequently, vaccination. Benjamin Franklin’s advocacy of inoculation was driven by the death of his son, Frankie, apparently due to smallpox. There were also rumors that Frankie died from an adverse reaction—protracted diarrhea—to inoculation.3 Franklin denied this rumor and publicly supported inoculation.

John and Abigail Adams were also proponents. John Adams suffered a horrible two-week illness after being inoculated. Abigail also suffered an adverse reaction.

Inoculation was rough business. People in colonial America understood that the procedure often included adverse reactions, injury, and even death. The willingness to take the risks involved in early inoculation had to be weighed against the scourge of smallpox. Desperate times meant desperate measures.

Smallpox inoculation efforts triggered riots in Norfolk County, Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, then a young lawyer, defended the victims of the Norfolk riots, including a Dr. Archibald Campbell, whose house was burned down. Ultimately, it was Thomas Jefferson who became vaccination’s biggest American advocate. Jefferson, who corresponded with Edward Jenner, was greatly influenced by Harvard’s Benjamin Waterhouse, one of New England’s only European-trained doctors. Waterhouse is largely regarded as the man who championed early vaccination in the United States.

Jefferson was, to put it mildly, distrustful of American doctors, remarking that “whenever he saw three physicians together he looked up to discover whether there was not a turkey buzzard in the neighborhood.”4 Jefferson was enamored with Waterhouse due to his European scientific training. Working with Waterhouse, Jefferson dispatched smallpox vaccines to souther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part I
• Part II
• Appendix
• Notes