Mothers and Vaccines: Saving or Destroying Children's Lives?

The Summer 1996 issue of "Mothering" magazine contained a well-intended article discussing the "risks and benefits" of vaccinations. The article's context, however, was dangerous to the public's health and welfare. Immunization critics were labeled "radical." Is this truly a radical position?

First, many intelligent parents recognize the manipulative power of the media through what it often provides--eighty percent truth and twenty percent distortions supportive to U.S. Government and allied industrial interests. For lack of a better term, and running the risk I might too be labeled "radical," let's call them the "military-medical-industrial complex (MMIC)".

In the "Science of Coercion" (Oxford Press, 1994) author Christopher Simpson exposes the insidious and destructive manner in which "psychological warfare" has been scientifically honed and practiced on world populations, particularly scientists in academia, by covert intelligence agencies working through a few academic and private institutions with principle funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. The result has been the development of very subtle and sophisticated communication methods by which humans are systematically brain-washed into holding certain beliefs that effect every aspect of what people think, say, and do. Ergo, Hitler's immortal proclamation that "the greater the lie, the more people will believe it, " has direct relevance to the often touted belief that "vaccines are safe and effective."

Mothering magazine's risk/benefit tables provided a good example of this counter-intelligence activity, typifying the subtle way in which the MMIC's official research data are biased for public persuasion. Critical readers, of which there are few, can notice that the risk of death from non-vaccination, for instance with pertussis, is expressed as "1:100 . . . in infants under 6 months" who get the disease. The average lay reader interprets this to mean an extraordinarily high risk, unaware that annually, the total number of children who get whooping cough in the U.S. is low, and more than 95% of these kids heal themselves quite well.

Compare this to the way in which vaccination risks are displayed. For example 1:10,000 for a "severe brain problem" from DPT vaccine. Here it appears as though the risk is very remote--misleading because you are comparing apples to oranges.

Additional misinformation in this issue included that "the United States Medical Research Institute changed from biological weaponry research, which was outlawed, to developing protective vaccines and controlling lethal microorganisms." The Church Committee hearings of 1975 documented otherwise. Investigators learned that George W. Merck, head of the Merck pharmaceutical company, also directed America's biological weapons industry, an industry rooted in Nazi biomedical research.

A my new book, Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola-- Nature, Accident or Intentional? (Tetrahedron, LLC, 1996), I show documents that the OSS, and later the CIA, exfiltrated chief Nazi medical officers to serve the U.S. military following WWII. Included was Erich Traub-- Hitler's chief biological weapons developer who pioneered California's Naval Biomedical Research Laboratory, which, a decade later, became one of the few National Cancer Institute (NCI) suppliers of cell cultures for cancer studies and viral vaccine research.

More recently, internationally known, highly respected scientists, Garth and Nancy Nicolson and Peter Behan, independently determined that Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) appears to be microbiological in nature and very plausibly the result of experimental vaccines administered to our service men and women. Within days of their reports to the press, a major media blitz persuaded Americans otherwise-- that GWS, and related chronic fatigue, was the result of "drug interactions." Later, the government, after severe grassroots pressure, acknowledged the possibility of biological weapons exposures as well, but to date, no mention has been made of military vaccine manufacturer culpability. Documents indicate that Tanox Biosystems--whose major investors included former Secretary of State James Baker II and Past President and CIA Director George Bush--tested an experimental vaccine in Huntsville, Texas prisoners. This vaccine test subsequently led to an outbreak of GWS in the inmates, prison guards and their families long before the Gulf War. The doctors conclude that vaccines most plausibly initiated immune suppression and illnesses consistent with the outbreak pattern and symptomatology.

Vaccine manufacturers and their supporters use traditional psychological warfare fear appeals to argued the need for more immunizations. Mothering, for instance, wrote that "the HIV epidemic has shown how a disease can spread in a susceptible population." and suggested that since other diseases do the same, more vaccines are urgently needed. During the XI International AIDS Conference in Vancouver this summer, my colleagues and I presented evidence that HIV-1 and its relative HIV-2 evolved either accidentally or purposefully from cancer virus investigations and vaccine studies involving African primates. Specifically, this work led to the 1974 experimental hepatitis B vaccine trial in which 200,000 humans in New York City and Central Africa were given contaminated vaccine that most plausibly delivered AIDS to the world. All facts considered, this best accounts for the near simultaneous emergence of AIDS in 1978 in New York City and Central Africa.

A Mothering spokesperson asserted, "Literally thousands of studies have been done showing the efficacy of vaccines. The FDA and similar agencies require these studies prior to approving a new vaccine." This too is false and misleading. The FDA does not assure vaccine safety. Nor do they even report to the medical-scientific community, or the general public, all of the risks inherent in live viral vaccines. Studies that show potential problems, including the contamination of monkey viruses in currently required live polio vaccines, have had little impact on the viral vaccine approval process. Apparently, FDA regulators, themselves, are denied certain critical information belonging to the vaccine industry. Specifically, FDA regulations are written so as not to compel industry to reveal pertinent information regarding vaccine lots that are not submitted for clinical use, but have major ramifications in assessing a vaccine's safety. Moreover, since vaccine development information is considered proprietary--protected by non-disclosure policies--government officials and researchers must shield potential safety issues from public scrutiny. This censorship is additionally rationalized by the all too persuasive argument that vaccines cannot be criticized lest the public become non-compliant in taking them. In the end, health care professionals and the general public do not learn of all the dangers of live viral vaccines.

Finally, the issue of monkey virus contamination of the live polio virus vaccines represents the most urgent and striking example of public health risk and information suppression in the vaccine industry. That carcinogenic monkey viruses contaminated, and continue to taint, or oral polio vaccines has been suppressed since the early 1960s. In 1972, on the eve of Nixon's war on cancer, a joint Lederle Corporation/FDA Bureau of Biologics study additionally showed that eleven test monkeys, otherwise destined for polio vaccine production, tested positively for the simian cytomegalovirus (SCMV)--a herpesvirus, of monkey origin, researcher have found associated with patients suffering from chronic fatigue. The continued reluctance of the FDA to act on this matter was revealed in a corporate memo delivered the following year. Sadly, over the past quarter century, virtually nothing has changed. Even in 1996, following reports to FDA officials concerning patients infected with a SCMV-derived virus, no new in-house testing of polio vaccines for SCMV has occurred. Moreover, specific requests for vaccine material to undertake the needed safety tests, at no cost to the government by W. John Martin, M.D.,Ph.D., were denied on the basis of protecting "proprietary" interests.

In light of this information, Mothering's prediction that the CDC would likely approve the recent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendation that the polio vaccination series consist of two doses of inactivated vaccine followed by two doses of live oral polio vaccine (Lederle's product) does not adequately address the issue of live vaccine contaminants. Recent studies published in "Virology" and the "Journal of Environmental Pathology" found simian virus (SV40) genes associated with brain tumors in children too young to have received the polio vaccine. Meaning? The infants likely contracted the monkey virus from people who had received the polio vaccine, possibly their parents. The viral genes could have spread from parents to children either through environmental exposures or through genetic inheritance. Thus, the "radical" doctors' most horrifying fears have come true. Potential cancer causing animal virus genes now appear to be circulating throughout the human race.

As British poet Tennyson wrote, "lies containing part truths are the hardest matters to fight." Mothering's well-meaning issue supported the MMIC's mass persuasion method of including the "radical" opposition's view, but confused the debate with misinformation. Like the MMIC, Mothering's FEAR messages were hurled loud and clear, e.g., high death rates among non-vaccinated children, along with the prescription for allaying the concerns of misinformed parents--mandatory vaccination. Mothers beware! Your most precious blessing-- your innocent child's life_teeters on your decision to vaccinate. Following blindly and depending solely on unreliable sources of information in this regard is the unfortunate path too many thousands have thus far taken.

Leonard G. Horowitz, D.M.D., M.A., M.P.H.*

* Dr. Horowitz is an internationally known authority in behavioral science and public health education. One of healthcare's most captivating motivational speakers, Dr. Horowitz has served on the faculties of Harvard and Tufts Universities. Those in the vaccine awareness movement are encouraged to read Dr. Horowitz's new book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola--Nature, Accident or Intentional?" and contact Dr. Horowitz to schedule a speaking engagement for your group during his 1997 author tour.