Did vaccines save humanity?
BY J.B.
HANDLEY August 3, 2018
Since 1900, there's been a massive
decline in mortality rates in developed countries, largely due to a marked
decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. Did vaccines play a major role in
this decline? The history and data provide clear answers that matter
greatly in today's vitriolic debate about vaccines.
Dr. Edward H. Kass
CHICAGO, Illinois —Since 1900, the mortality
rate in America has
declined by roughly 74%, creating a dramatic improvement in
quality of life and life expectancy for Americans. The simple question is,
"Why?"
Why did the mortality rate
decline so precipitously? If you listen to vaccine promoters, the answer is
simple: vaccines saved us. What's crazy about this narrative is how easy it is
to disprove, the data is hiding in plain sight. The fact that this
easily-proven-false narrative persists, however, tells us a lot about the world
we live in, and I hope will encourage parents to reconsider the veracity of
many of the narratives they've been fed about vaccines.
1970, Dr. Edward H. Kass
Standing before his
colleagues on October 19, 1970, Harvard's Dr.
Edward H. Kass gave a speech to the annual meeting of the Infectious
Diseases Society of America that would likely get him run out of this same
profession today. At the time, Dr. Kass was actually the President of the
organization, which made the things he had to say about vaccines and their
impact on the reduction in American mortality rates even more shocking, at
least by today's standards. Forty-eight years after Dr. Kass' speech, vaccines
have taken on a mythological status in many corners of our world, hyped up by
the people who benefit the most from their use. Of course vaccines saved the
world. Of course every child should get every vaccine. If you
don't vaccinate, you will enable the return of deadly childhood diseases. If
you don't vaccinate, your child will die. If you question vaccines, even a
little, you're an "anti-vaxxer" who should be shunned and dismissed!
But
what if most of the history about the role vaccines played in declining
mortality isn’t even true?
In his famous speech, Dr. Kass took his infectious disease colleagues to task, warning them that drawing false conclusions about WHY mortality rates had declined so much could cause them to focus on the wrong things. As he explained:
"...we
had accepted some half truths and had stopped searching for the whole truths.
The principal half truths were that medical research had stamped out the great
killers of the past —tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia,
puerperal sepsis, etc. —and that medical research and our superior
system of medical care were major factors extending life expectancy, thus
providing the American people with the highest level of health available in the
world. That these are half truths is known but is perhaps not as well known as
it should be."
Dr. Kass then shared some
eye-opening charts with his colleagues. I'm trying to imagine a President of
the Infectious Diseases Society of America sharing one of these charts today at
a meeting of public health officials. I picture someone turning the power off
for the room where he's presenting and then he gets tackled and carried off the
stage...here's the first example of a chart Dr. Kass shared in 1970:
But wait a minute, Dr. Kass'
chart doesn't even include the measles vaccine...what gives? Well, in 1970, the
measles vaccine was just beginning to be rolled out, and as you can clearly
see, measles had long since experienced a dramatic decline in mortality. With
Pertussis (Whooping Cough), he produced a similar chart:
In this case, you can
actually see when the Pertussis vaccine was introduced. He also showed a chart
for Scarlett Fever, which furthers the confusion about the role of vaccines,
because there's never been a Scarlett Fever vaccine, and yet the chart of a
huge decline in mortality from Scarlett Fever looks very similar to measles and
pertussis:
What's the point?
Dr. Kass was trying to make
a simple point to his colleagues, but one with profound implications for public
health. His point was so important, I'm going to quote him in really big font
to try and drive it home:
“This
decline in rates of certain disorders, correlated roughly with socioeconomic
circumstances, is merely the most important happening in the history of the
health of man, yet we have only the vaguest and most general notions about how
it happened and by what mechanisms socioeconomic improvement and decreased
rates of certain diseases run in parallel.”
Dr. Kass pled with his
colleagues to be open to understanding WHY infectious diseases had declined so
dramatically in the U.S. (as well as other first world countries). Was it
nutrition? Sanitary methods? A reduction in home crowding? (We've since learned
the answer to all three questions is, "Yes.") He encouraged his
colleagues to be careful not to jump to conclusions prematurely and to maintain
objectivity and "devote ourselves to new possibilities."
Luckily for us, Dr. Kass'
speech that day has been saved for posterity, as it was printed in its entirety
in a medical journal. In fact, it's a journal that Dr. Kass himself founded, The
Journal of Infectious Diseases, and his speech is called, "Infectious
Disease and Social Change." There are a number of things about Dr.
Kass' speech that I found breathtaking, especially given that he was the
President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Namely:
1. He never referred to
vaccines as "mankind's greatest invention" or one of the other many
hyperbolic ways vaccines are described all the time by vaccine promoters in the
press today. Vaccines weren't responsible for saving "millions of
lives" in the United States, as Dr. Kass well knew.
2. In fact, he never gave
vaccines much credit AT ALL for the developed world's dramatic mortality
decline. Which makes sense, because none of the data he had would have
supported that view. Which made me wonder, "has anyone tried to put the
contribution of vaccines to the decline in human mortality in the 20th century
in context?" Said differently, is there any data that measures exactly how
much impact vaccines had in saving humanity? Yes, indeed there is.
1977: McKinlay & McKinlay: The most famous study you've never heard of
It won't be the world's
easiest read, but I hope you take the time to read every word. In 1977, Boston
University epidemiologists (and husband and wife) John and Sonja McKinlay
published the seminal work on the role vaccines (and other medical
interventions) played in the massive decline in mortality seen in the twentieth
century, that 74% number I talked about in my opening paragraph. Not only that,
but their study warned against the very behavior we are now seeing in the world
of vaccines. Namely, they warned that a group of profiteers might take more
credit for the results of an intervention (vaccines) than the intervention
deserves, and then use those fake results to create a world where their product
must be used by everyone. Seriously, they predicted that this would happen.
(It's worth noting that the McKinlay Study used to be required reading at every
medical school.)
Published in 1977 in The
Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, the McKinlay's study was titled, "The
Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in
the United States in the Twentieth Century." The study clearly proved,
with data, something that the McKinlay's acknowledged might be viewed by some
as medical "heresy." Namely:
"that the introduction of specific medical measures and/or the expansion of medical services are generally not responsible for most of the modern decline in mortality."
By "medical
measures," the McKinlay's really meant ANYTHING modern medicine had come
up with, whether that was antibiotics, vaccines, new prescription drugs, whatever. The
McKinlay's 23-page study really should be read cover to cover, but in a
nutshell the McKinlay's sought to analyze how much of an impact medical
interventions (antibiotics, surgery, vaccines) had on this massive decline
in mortality rates between 1900 and 1970:
Here are some of the major
points their paper made:
- 92.3% of the mortality
rate decline happened between 1900 and 1950 [before most vaccines existed]
- Medical measures
"appear to have contributed little to the overall decline in mortality in
the United States since about 1900--having in many instances been introduced
several decades after a marked decline had already set in and having no
detectable influence in most instances."
And, here's the two doozies...
The paper makes two points
that I really want to highlight, because they are so important. The first one
concerns vaccines. They write:
"Even
if it were assumed that this change was entirely due to the vaccines, then only
about one percent of the decline following interventions for
the diseases considered here could be attributed to medical measures. Rather
more conservatively, if we attribute some of the subsequent fall in the death
rates for pneumonia, influenza, whooping cough, and diphtheria to medical
measures, then perhaps 3.5 percent of the fall in the overall death rate can be
explained through medical intervention in the major infectious diseases
considered here. Indeed, given that it is precisely for these diseases
that medicine claims most success in lowering mortality, 3.5 percent
probably represents a reasonable upper-limit estimate of the total contribution
of medical measures to the decline in mortality in the United States since
1900."
In plain English: of the
total decline in mortality since 1900, that 74% number I keep
mentioning, vaccines (and other medical interventions like antibiotics)
were responsible for somewhere between 1% and 3.5% of that decline. Said
differently, at least 96.5% of the decline (and likely more than that since
their numbers included ALL medical interventions, not ONLY vaccines) had
nothing to do with vaccines.
You
don’t get to say you saved humanity if, at most, you were responsible for 3.5%
of the decline in mortality rates since 1900 (and probably closer to 1%).
And then the McKinlay's
wrote something that made me laugh out loud, because it's the thing we are
seeing every day in today's vaccine-hyped world:
“It
is not uncommon today for biotechnological knowledge and specific medical
interventions to be invoked as the major reason for most of the modern
(twentieth century) decline in mortality. Responsibility for this decline is
often claimed by, or ascribed to, the present-day major beneficiaries of this
prevailing explanation.”
The guy they were warning us
about
Sound familiar?
2000: the CDC puts the final nail in the coffin
In 1970, Dr. Kass raised the
idea that public health officials need to be careful to not give the wrong things
credit for the twentieth century's massive mortality rate decline in the
developed world. In 1977, Drs. McKinlay & McKinlay put data around Dr.
Kass' ideas, and showed that vaccines (and other medical interventions) were
responsible for between 1-3.5% of the total decline in mortality since 1900. In
2000, CDC scientists reconfirmed all this data, but also provided more insight
into the things that actually have led to declines in mortality.
Published in September 2000
in the journal Pediatrics and titled, "Annual
Summary of Vital Statistics: Trends in the Health of Americans During the 20th
Century," epidemiologists from both Johns Hopkins and the Centers
for Disease Control reaffirmed what we had already learned from McKinlay and
McKinlay:
“Thus
vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in
the first half of the century...nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease
mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or
vaccine were available.”
The study went on to explain
the things that actually were responsible for a massive decline in mortality:
"water treatment, food safety, organized solid waste disposal, and public education about hygienic practices." Also, "improvements in crowding in US cities" played a major role. Clean water. Safe food. Nutrition. Plumbing. Hygiene. These are the primary reasons humanity was saved.
Recent history
I get really strong
reactions when I share this chart, compiled from CDC data:
This chart is compiled from
this dataset
provided by the CDC. You can see that nine vaccines we give children today
didn't even exist in the mid-1980s. Moreover, the vaccination rates for the
three vaccines that did exist were hovering near 60% or less as late as the
mid-1980s. Today, vaccination rates are all well north of 90% for American
children. I think it's fair to ask, "why so much panic"? If
you think about this chart for long enough, it makes you realize how silly the
oft-invoked notion of "herd immunity" really is, since we obviously
couldn't have been anywhere near vaccine-induced herd immunity in the mid-1980s.
In fact, we're really no closer today, because adult vaccination rates remain
so low, and vaccines wane over time. (I wrote a whole article about this topic,
click the image of the sheep to read it for yourself.)
Click to read
Why the truth matters
As McKinlay and McKinlay
warned, if the wrong intervention (like vaccines) is singled out as the reason
Americans and the rest of the first world experienced such a dramatic decrease
in mortality in the 20th century, that misinformation can be abused to do
things like:
- Rapidly expanding the
number of vaccines given to children
- Browbeating parents who
chose to follow a different vaccine schedule and making them feel guilty
- Making vaccines mandatory
for school attendance
- Speaking about vaccines in
such reverential terms that even questioning them (like I'm doing in this
article) is viewed as sacreligious and irresponsible.
- And, denying that vaccines
injuries happen at high rates, to keep the whole machine moving in the right
direction.
Africa, and other third world countries
Vaccine promoters will often
quote statistics about present-day deaths from infectious diseases that sound
deeply alarming. Using examples of a disease like measles, they might explain
how many children still die from measles every year, and therefore its gravely
important that EVERY American parent vaccinate their child for measles. Of
course, what they don't mention is that these infectious disease deaths are
happening in places that still have quality of life conditions akin to American
children of the early 1900s. Poor nutrition. No plumbing or refrigeration. Bad
hygiene practices. Crowded living conditions. All the things that ACTUALLY impacted
the mortality rate the most haven't yet been addressed in certain parts of
Africa and other third world countries, and JUST implementing vaccines won't
change the facts. This was Dr. Kass' point in the first place: know what
actually led to the mortality rate decline, and do more of that!
In fact, we now have some
data that shows vaccinating children living in situations where they have poor
nutrition and lack of sanitation can actually do more harm than good:
The "Aaby Study"
Dr. Peter Aaby (center)
Published in the
peer-reviewed journal EBioMedicine in 2017, the study is titled, “The
Introduction of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Oral Polio Vaccine Among Young
Infants in an Urban African Community: A Natural
Experiment." Researchers from the Research Center for Vitamins and
Vaccines, Statens Serum Institut (Denmark), and Bandim Health Project looked
closely at data from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The scientists
in this study closely explored the concept of NSEs, “nonspecific effects” of
vaccines, which is a fancy way of saying vaccines may make a child more susceptible
to other infections. They found that the data for African children who had been
vaccinated with the DTP vaccine:
“was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated. No prospective study has shown beneficial survival effects of DTP. . . . DTP is the most widely used vaccine. . . . All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus, or pertussis. Though a vaccine protects children against the target disease, it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.”
In lay terms, this means
that giving an African child the DTP vaccine may make the child sick from other
infections. It appears that in Africa, the living conditions are more important
than the vaccine (as you would very much expect from Dr. Kass' and the Drs.
McKinlay's work), and the DTP vaccine did indeed do more harm than good. (It's
worth noting that Dr. Aaby was a highly regarded vaccine researcher until he
published this study in 2017. It's my understanding that he has since lost his
funding sources. Welcome to today's world of vaccine "science.")
Every Second Child
We actually have another
real world example of this phenomenon from the late 1970s. Dr. Archie
Kalokerinos made a simple discovery, as he explains:
"At
first it was just a simple clinical observation. I observed that many infants,
after they received routine vaccines like tetanus, diphtheria, polio, whooping
cough or whatever, became ill. Some became extremely ill, and in fact some
died. It was an observation, It was not a theory. So my first reaction was to
look at the reasons why this happened. Of course I found it was more likely to
happen in infants who were ill at the time of receiving a vaccine, or infants
who had been ill recently, or infants who were incubating an infection. Of
course in the early stages of incubation there is no way whatsoever that anyone
can detect the disease. They turn up later on. Furthermore, some of the
reactions to the vaccines were not those that were listed in the standard literature.
They
were very strange reactions indeed. A third observation was that with some of
these reactions which normally resulted in death I found that I could reverse
them by giving large amounts of vitamin C intramuscularly or intravenously. One
would have expected, of course, that the authorities would take an interest in
these observations that resulted in a dramatic drop in the death rate of
infants in the area under my control, a very dramatic drop. But instead of
taking an interest their reaction was one of extreme hostility. This forced me
to look into the question of vaccination further, and the further I looked into
it the more shocked I became. I found that the whole vaccine business was
indeed a gigantic hoax. Most doctors are convinced that they are useful, but if
you look at the proper statistics and study the instance of these diseases you
will realise that this is not so."
Dr Kalokerinos also said
something in 1995 that it appears Dr. Aaby's study was able to corroborate in
2017:
“And
if you want to see what harm vaccines do, don’t come to Australia or New
Zealand or any place, go to Africa and you will see it there.”
We actually knew the truth in the early 1900s, even before the rapid decline in mortality
J.T. Biggs
Well ahead of his time,
Englishman John Thomas Biggs was the sanitary engineer for his town of Leicester
and had to actively respond to outbreaks of smallpox. He quickly learned that
the public health outcomes from sanitation vastly outweighed
the impact of vaccination (where he saw dramatic vaccine injury and
ineffectiveness). He wrote a definitive work in 1912, Leicester:
Sanitation versus Vaccination. More than one hundred years ago,
Mr. Biggs discovered what the CDC reaffirmed in 2000: Nothing protects from
infectious disease like proper sanitation. He explained:
Leicester
has furnished, both by precept and example, irrefutable proof of the capability
and influence of Sanitation, not only in combating and controlling, but also in
practically banishing infectious diseases from its midst. . . . A
town newly planned on the most up-to-date principles of space and air, and
adopting the “Leicester Method” of Sanitation, could bid defiance not to
small-pox only, but to other infectious, if not to nearly all zymotic,
diseases.
Dr, Andrew Weil
Dr. Andrew Weil, the
oft-quoted celebrity doctor, reenforces the point, explaining that “medicine
has taken credit it does not deserve for some advances in health. Most people
believe that victory over the infectious diseases of the last century came with
the invention of immunizations. In fact, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, diphtheria,
and whooping cough, and the others were in decline before vaccines for them
became available — the result of better methods of sanitation, sewage disposal,
and distribution of food and water.”
Finally
Caution: your pediatrician
will hate this chart, which was created by pediatrician Dr. Bob Sears
Vaccines didn’t save
humanity. Their impact was somewhere between 1-3.5% of the total decline in
mortality rates. Improvement in sanitation and standards of living really did
(nutrition, living conditions, etc.). Did vaccines contribute to a small
decrease of certain acute illnesses? Yes, but their relative benefit is often
exaggerated to an extreme, and then used to browbeat, guilt, and scare parents.
So am I saying no one should
vaccinate? No, I'm not. Vaccines provide temporary protection from certain
acute illnesses. Some matter more than others. I think we give way too many
vaccines, and I think the risk/benefit equation of each vaccine is never
properly revealed to parents. Worse, the lie that vaccines saved humanity in
the twentieth century has turned many vaccine promoters into zealots, even
though their narratives are simply not supported by the facts.
In late 2017, it was
reported that Emory University scientists were developing a common cold
vaccine. Professor Martin Moore bragged that his research “takes 50 strains of
the common cold and puts it into one shot” and that the monkeys who served as
test subjects “responded very well.” You should expect to see this vaccine at
your pediatrician’s office in the next five years, which will likely be rolled out
soon after the stories start to appear in the media about the common cold
causing childhood deaths, and that millions of lives will be saved, much as
vaccines saved the world in the twentieth century...parents beware, and do your
own research!
About the author
J.B. Handley is the proud father of
a child with Autism. He and his wife co-founded Generation Rescue,
a national autism charity, in 2005. He spent his career in the private equity
industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford
University in 1991. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, will
be published in September 2018 by Chelsea Green Publishing and is available for
pre-order on Amazon.
He is also the author of "A
lone FDA scientist could end the autism epidemic." and International
scientists have found autism's cause. What will Americans do? Learn
more here.
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