T
he
BioShield Bill currently making its way through Congress gives $6
billion of taxpayer money to the major pharmaceutical companies
to subsidize the development of drugs and vaccines as “countermeasures”
to possible biological and chemical attacks. The bill pays for the
warehousing of drugs and vaccines for which the FDA has granted
a special exemption from the usual approval process to allow the
countermeasures to be fast tracked through FDA approval and used
on the public with no human testing at all, an unprecedented step
for an industry that is already the third leading cause of death
in the United States.
The
pharmaceutical industry sustains a generally excellent reputation
as most people believe the drug companies always put safety first
in their humane mission to develop medicines to heal the sick. But
the facts belie this gentle reputation—between 100,000 and
200,000 people die each year from correctly prescribed medications
in the hospital alone, not including drug-induced deaths occurring
outside the hospital or from incorrectly prescribed medications.
No other industry is responsible for such a shockingly high death
rate repeated year after year, a death rate that would probably
cause great alarm and Congressional hearings if it occurred in any
other industry. Yet even these numbers are underestimated, as David
Kessler, who ran the FDA for much of the 1990s, has stated that
from 90 to 99 percent of all adverse drug reactions are never reported,
which would make the actual death and injury rate from legal drugs
astronomical.
Bush’s Smallpox Program Fiasco
L
ooking
at Bush’s Smallpox Vaccination program reveals the kind of
unscientific and fraudulent thinking on the part of the pharmaceuticals
that leads to these kinds of death and injury rates. When the program
began, Bush called for vaccination of 500,000 health care workers,
the so-called “first responders” to a possible biological
attack of smallpox. In the months leading up to the program, the
mainstream media informed us that the public could expect 1 to 2
deaths per million from the vaccine and a serious adverse reaction
rate of 1 in 4,000. However, there is no basis on which to estimate
the death and injury rates for adults taking the vaccine since there
has never been a long-term study on the safety of the smallpox vaccine
or on any vaccine, another fact that is consistently suppressed
from the public.
Because
of the exorbitant number of deaths and injuries, multiple states
suspended the program in the spring of 2003 and Bush’s smallpox
program essentially ground to a halt. As of June 2003, approximately
35,000 civilians (including the several hundred embedded reporters)
of various ages and health status have been vaccinated, which gives
us an initial test group from which to draw some conclusions. Of
the 35,000 civilians vaccinated, 3 have died, which makes the death
rate 80 times higher than we had been told to expect. Yet in mainstream
media articles about the deaths in the smallpox program, the public
continues to be misled with the old, inaccurate numbers rather than
the newly updated and much higher death rate. Serious adverse reactions
that result in hospitalization, permanent disability, and life threatening
illnesses— including heart attacks, heart inflammation, brain
encephalitis, uncontrolled ulceration of the skin and more, turn
out to be 1 in 583, 7 times higher than the CDC’s original
guesstimate of 1 in 4,000.
However,
it is virtually certain that even these increased death and injury
rates are inaccurate and much higher than reported. First, the official
definition of “serious” reactions discounts some effects
that most of us would consider serious, such as the young, healthy
20-year-old volunteers in a test, before Bush’s program began,
who stated that the pain in their arm after vaccination was so intense
that they wanted to “cut their arm off.” There were reports
of fevers so high and infections so uncontrolled that antibiotics
were given to 30 percent of the participants. If vaccination occurred
on a mass scale as planned, the hospitals would be flooded with
hundreds of thousands of acutely ill victims who would be unable
to get treatment, overwhelming the system and increasing the death
toll.
Also
omitted from mainstream media is the fact that the federal reporting
system is not mandatory, and that the time frame in which adverse
reactions are noted is a vague “three to four weeks.”
As any doctor or person who has suffered a serious chronic health
problem knows, it takes time for the body to develop and display
disabling symptoms of a chronic disease. Just because the causative
factor is a vaccine does not mean that serious, chronic illnesses
will surface quickly and suddenly or that they will be “easier”
conditions to treat than “regular” chronic illnesses.
The fact that the causative factor was an avoidable event—the
vaccine—is even worse, as the recipients may continue to suffer
from serious illnesses such as chronic heart conditions over time,
which the medical profession will then deny was related to the vaccine.
Because
they are not doing any kind of vaccine trial comparing vaccine recipients
to a healthy control group, the opportunity to accurately track
the first 35,000 has been squandered and future participants are
being recklessly endangered. Poor and even non-existent adverse
reporting systems are standard procedure in the pharmaceutical industry.
Most people don’t know that the release onto the market of
a new drug or vaccine is actually the final phase of the new drug
trial called Phase IV. When thousands of people are prescribed a
new drug, they are unwittingly participating in the largest, most
poorly controlled drug study in the world, as this is generally
the phase when the 100,000 to 200,000 deaths per year noted earlier
occur. Neither the pharmaceutical industry nor the FDA requires
mandatory reporting of adverse reactions or even death—it is
entirely voluntary. Forty percent of all doctors don’t even
know that an adverse reaction reporting system exists.
In
a profound and deadly conflict of interest, the marketing department
responsible for recouping the hundreds of millions of dollars invested
in developing the new drug is also in charge of tracking and compiling
any adverse reactions that would get the drug pulled from the market.
This legal, but flawed, system is why so many deaths occur before
the FDA pulls the product from the marketplace, as the delay and
obfuscation can mean millions and millions of dollars for the pharmaceuticals
before the drug’s demise.
Dark History of the Smallpox Vaccine
T
he
premeditated ineffectiveness of tracking systems to monitor vaccine
injuries, chronic diseases, and death is designed to obscure the
unscientific foundation of the entire concept of smallpox vaccination.
Dr. Edward Jenner, the creator of the smallpox vaccine in 1796,
based the vaccine on a mistaken superstition that milkmaids or farmers
who had been infected with cowpox developed immunity to smallpox.
(Cowpox is a non-lethal, ulcerative disease on the udders of a cow
that sometimes causes ulcers on the hands of milkmaids or farmers
who milk them.) But as historical records show, many of Jenner’s
medical contemporaries immediately disputed his claim by noting
that had he polled any number of veterinarians in his county, he
could have easily uncovered dozens of cases of smallpox in humans
that had followed infection by cowpox. This supposition—that
cowpox gives humans natural immunity from smallpox—was never
proven by Jenner, or any other practitioner of vaccination from
his era, and has never been tested or proven by any of the pharmaceuticals
who produce the vaccine today. The very basis of the smallpox vaccine
is fundamentally flawed.
To
test his vaccine, Jenner infected six children, including his infant
son, with various experimental “brews” including cowpow,
swinepox, and the grease from horses’ hooves. His experiments
killed an eight-year-old boy in a matter of days from an uncontrolled
ulcerative infection from the “horse grease” vaccine and
the children were never exposed to any smallpox epidemics to test
their resistance. Jenner waited only four years before declaring
that the vaccine that he named vaccinia provided immunity from smallpox
for life.
Not
only was the vaccine immediately noted for causing injuries and
deaths, but doctors of the day emphatically pointed out that it
did not prevent smallpox. There are historical records from tests
on hundreds of patients from 1802-1810 in which doctors published
the results and submitted their statistics of overwhelming death
and injury to the government medical board in England. All of these
tests occurred outside of Jenner’s control and all were abject
failures. In 1805, only a few years after the vaccine was introduced,
“out of 504 vaccinated in England, 75 died from the vaccine
and almost all have had the small-pox, some sooner, some later,
after their vaccination,” as recounted by Dr. William Rowley,
a member of the University of Oxford and of the Royal College of
Physicians in London, and Physician Extraordinary to Her Majesty’s
Lying-in-Hospital. He continued, “There is no question here
of supposition or calculation of probability, it is truth.”
In 1799, a Dr. William Woodville conducted a study on several hundred
patients that resulted in many deaths and injuries as a direct result
of the vaccine. But when he tried to publish the negative results
of the trial, Dr. Jenner wrote, “I entreated him in the
strongest terms, both by letter and conversation, not to do a thing
that would so much disturb the progress of vaccination,” in
an attempt to censor the facts that ran contrary to Jenner’s
theory. Even as Jenner ignored the evidence of harm and helped
to suppress the facts, he was already receiving government funding
by an Act of Parliament which had funded him in the hopes that a
cure for smallpox had been found. When the hundreds of reports of
injury and death were published during the early years of vaccination,
the government should have admitted to funding a faulty program
and ended it. Instead, they invested £20,000 in 1807 and £3,000
per year thereafter, accepting as “science” the claim
that a procedure only seven-years-old would protect from smallpox
for life, thereby making vaccination a permanent source of income
for the medical profession.
If
it seems unbelievable that the government of England should fund
a medical procedure that not only didn’t work, but actually
caused serious harm, we need look no further than our own pharmaceutical
industry and government of today for the same pattern. Drugs continue
to be marketed even after they have been shown to cause death and
injury and President Bush continues to push his smallpox program
by offering $100 million to state programs to proceed even after
the astronomical percentage of deaths and injuries from the first
phase of the program, while censoring, obscuring, and rewriting
the terrible science underlying this vaccine.
Just
as now, once vaccination became entrenched in the medical society,
doctors found a new and lucrative source of income and industries
sprang up which produced the vaccine both by continuing the human
to human method and by going back to the cow to produce supposedly
“pure” cow vaccine. However, in a test of 13 different
brands of vaccine in 1900, not one was found to be bacteriologically
pure and in some, hundreds of colonies of teaming germs were found.
Just
as there exists a controversy today about the safety and efficacy
of vaccines, Jenner’s medical contemporaries immediately formed
a vocal Anti-Vaccinationist resistance movement to speak out against
the “transplanting of disease back and forth from animal to
human.” Voluminous historical records display excellent science,
careful thinking, and methodical observations of the vaccine and
a record of the same kinds of adverse reactions and deaths we see
today. They noted brain swelling and encephalitis, paralysis, blindness,
increased incidence of tuberculosis and pneumonia, and progressive
vaccinia in which the ulcerative sores caused by the vaccine spread
over the whole body down to the bone and organs, causing a terrible
and painful death, some in a matter of days after the administration
of the vaccine and some over an extended period of suffering. One
such case was described in 1855 by a Dr. R. T. Trall who stated,
“I have seen within the last year a most horridly loathsome
case…in which the patient literally rotted alive at the age
of 15, from unhealthy virus [vaccine] received when he was but three
years of age.” (As grotesque as it may seem, the bodies of
the victims were so overrun with the deadly virus that they frequently
decomposed in a matter of hours as if the corpse had been dead for
weeks.)
Today
this condition is called “progressive or generalized vaccinia”
where the ulcer that forms at the vaccine site grows uncontrollably—we
have had three cases during Bush’s program that we are aware
of. That it took 12 years in this case for the vaccinia virus to
progress to death shows again how it takes time for the full effects
of the vaccine to develop and because of the limited time frame
involved in Bush’s smallpox program, that death would never
be attributed to the vaccine even though the illness began directly
after receiving it. The number and type of adverse reactions were
so consistent and so numerous that physicians actually named the
condition “Vaccine Disease,” a recognized diagnosis that
carried with it a defined and universally recognized set of symptoms.
By
the 1850s, much of Europe made vaccination mandatory under threat
of fine and imprisonment and it is during these years that we can
see not only how ineffective the vaccine was at stopping the spread
of smallpox, but also that the vaccine actually increased the incidence
of smallpox. If the science of vaccination worked, it should have
prevented epidemics in the first place, but instead, while the population
of England increased 16 percent during the years of compulsory vaccination,
smallpox deaths increased 160 percent, a figure that does not include
the deaths from the vaccine. Using official records from government
medical registries from town after town in Europe, the same pattern
is repeated over and over of increased incidence of, and death from,
smallpox among the vaccinated.Before vaccination was made mandatory
in England, the highest recorded death rate from smallpox was 2,000
for any 2-year period. However after 20 years of compulsory vaccination
when nearly all of the population had been vaccinated (96.5 percent
from age 2 to 50), the death rate during the epidemic of 1871 was
23,000. Germany (Prussia) was over 95 percent vaccinated, enforced
multiple revaccinations every few years, and kept the best vaccination
records in Europe. Yet they still recorded over 1,000,000 cases
of smallpox during the 1871 epidemic, suffering the highest death
rate in all of Europe with 124,000, all of whom had been registered
as vaccinated.
In
report after report from city and health officials, hospital records
repeatedly show 90 percent and more of smallpox patients had been
fully vaccinated. In a report published in the
British Medical
Journal
, Dr. L. Parry analyzed vaccination statistics from the
19th century concluding, “smallpox is five times more likely
to be fatal in the vaccinated as in the unvaccinated.”
Anti-Vaccinationists
pointed to the town of Leicester, England for proof that vaccination
actually increased smallpox deaths. Leicester suffered 3,500 deaths
per million of its 95 percent vaccinated population during that
same epidemic of 1871, but when the people saw how many suffered
and died from the vaccination and then how many of the fully vaccinated
died during the epidemic, they rose up in unison with their town
officials and became the first town in England to officially resist
mandatory vaccination. Dire predictions of catastrophe and death
from pro-vaccinationists followed, but instead, in less than 20
years the numbers reversed and 95 percent were unvaccinated. Where
individual outbreaks of smallpox occurred, they were isolated by
the community and given quality medical care and general assistance
instead of vaccination. No case of smallpox ever grew into an epidemic
again, giving Leicester the lowest smallpox mortality rate of any
town in England.
By
the 1890s, resistance to mandatory vaccination was so fierce in
England that Parliament empowered a Royal Commission to try and
understand why England was still experiencing smallpox epidemics
even though the vast majority of its population was vaccinated.
The great scientist and thinker Alfred Russel Wallace, a colleague
of Charles Darwin, was invited to report to the Commission on the
safety and efficacy of smallpox vaccination. The evidence submitted
by Wallace and the other Anti-Vaccinationist doctors showed overwhelmingly
that cowpox had never been proven to provide immunity from smallpox;
that an impure and dangerous vaccine was created by both passing
diseased pus from human to human and from diseased cow matter; that
the vaccine did not prevent smallpox; that revaccination did not
prevent smallpox; that the vaccine was causing multiple injuries
and deaths; that the vaccine actually increased the incidence of
smallpox; and that the reporting system for smallpox injury and
death was inadequate because the numbers of deaths and injuries
from the vaccine were vastly underreported. Through the sustained
resistance of the Anti-Vaccination movement, mandatory vaccination
was finally repealed in England in 1898.
While
these facts stand in stark contrast to all we have been taught about
smallpox epidemics, in reviewing original historical medical sources,
publications and statistics from the past 200 years, it becomes
clear that infectious diseases other than smallpox declined 90 percent
before mass vaccination was ever introduced. The decline in smallpox
was actually delayed by vaccination and the cessation of vaccination
did more to end smallpox than vaccination ever did. Instead, medical
experts of today and the past attribute the cessation of all epidemic
diseases such as measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and diphtheria
to improvements in sanitation and nutrition. Just prior to 1800,
a major sanitation reform movement designed and implemented drainage
systems to move human waste out of the streets, where it then flowed,
and into plumbing systems; to regularly clean streets and stables
of horse manure and human waste; to improve roads so that vegetables
and milk could be transported to cities and distributed while fresh;
and to upgrade the water supply to prevent bacterial contamination.
All the old terror diseases such as plague, black death, and cholera
responded to these reforms without vaccination and all epidemics
declined throughout the 1800s except for smallpox, which surged
with mandatory vaccination and declined only after it ended. After
the massive epidemic of 1871, Germany embarked on a national campaign
to clean their cities and build a drainage system throughout the
entire country which finally caused smallpox to become virtually
extinct in less than 30 years, something which mandatory vaccination
did not accomplish in 60 years. Even the CDC reported in 1999 that
infectious diseases declined in the past century due to improvements
in sanitation, water, and hygiene.An extraordinary number of scientists
and thinkers have objected to vaccination since its creation including
Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Mark Twain, and, in the 20th
century, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. In the United States, over
300 children (that we know of) died from the smallpox vaccine between
1948 and 1971 while there wasn’t a single reported case of
smallpox. Professor Ari Zuckerman, a member of the World Health
Organization’s advisory panel on viruses, stated, “Immunization
against smallpox is more hazardous than the disease itself,”
and the American Medical Association, the Association of American
Physicians and Surgeons, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and
the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommended against
use of the smallpox vaccine. Even though the World Health Organization
claims credit for the eradication of smallpox worldwide through
vaccination, the facts tell us that smallpox declined in countries
around the world whether the population had been vaccinated or not.
Forced Vaccinations
T
he
history of the smallpox vaccine and the resistance movement against
it becomes extremely informative now that history is repeating itself
in the passage of the Homeland Security Bill and state laws called
the Model Health Emergency Powers Act (MEHPA). MEHPA and Section
304 of the Homeland Security Bill function like the PATRIOT Act
of healthcare, except instead of depriving us of our civil liberties,
they deprive us of our most fundamental right of all—the ownership
of our bodies. Section 304 makes mandatory vaccination and other
medical treatments legal once again, making refusal a crime punishable
by fine and/or prison. It calls for forced quarantine and isolation
of individuals and even entire cities, allows for the confiscation
of property of anyone who refuses treatment, and authorizes the
military to enforce medical treatment or quarantine. An actual act
of bioterrorism isn’t even necessary, a “potential”
emergency will suffice such as the current smallpox delusion in
which Americans are injected with the most dangerous vaccine in
history for protection against a disease that died out over 30 years
ago and for which no credible threat of its use as a bioweapon has
ever been received. (Note that during mandatory vaccination in England,
an average of 2,000 parents a year were prosecuted and jailed for
refusing to allow their children to be vaccinated and hundreds had
their homes and possessions confiscated.) This power to inject our
bodies with toxic poisons like the smallpox vaccine rests entirely
with two individuals—Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy
Thompson and President Bush. In a cynical move that protects the
government and manufacturers from the history of deception and bad
science, no public figure can be held accountable for any harm or
death that the medical procedure may produce. This protection extends
to the manufacturer of the vaccine, eliminating any financial incentive
to create a safe vaccine or responsibly investigate the efficacy
of any vaccination program.
BioWeapons Factories
T
he
fraudulent science of the smallpox vaccine and the draconian laws
of the Homeland Security Bill set the stage for a radical revision
of the mission and purpose of the pharmaceuticals. Ominously, the
first bioterror countermeasure that the BioShield bill calls for
development is another smallpox vaccine that uses the same, deadly
vaccinia virus in the current vaccine, but has additional dangerous
potential effects because it is genetically engineered, another
science that has a dark history of injuries, diseases, deaths, and
cover-ups. The bill also calls for development of bioterror drugs
and vaccines in response to anthrax, botulinum toxin, plague, and
ebola. In order to develop drugs and vaccines that are supposed
to respond to biological and chemical warfare agents, the companies
will have to create and store the actual agent. Until now, bioweapons
have been handled and stored at labs such as Fort Detrick, labs
which are supposed to operate under strict controls with guidelines
for safety set out by the U.S. government (not that the government
labs have been models of efficiency as their poor past record and
accidental releases have shown). But the BioShield bill doesn’t
set out provisions for the handling of these agents or any safety
measures at all, even though the bill effectively turns the pharmaceuticals
into new bioweapons factories. Six billion dollars may be
a small price to pay if the pharmaceuticals can accomplish the goal
as set out in the bill—to protect us from biological and chemical
attack. But common sense tells us any country technologically advanced
enough to create, store, and modify a bioweapon for release would
be competent enough to alter or genetically engineer it in any number
of ways that would make the creation of a drug or vaccine to that
particular strain of bioweapon impossible. Will the bioterrorists
really be so cooperative as to create only those few weapons for
which the pharmaceuticals have developed and warehoused countermeasures?
Since the pharmaceuticals said it would be unethical to test bioweapon
countermeasures on humans and pushed the FDA for the exemption from
human testing, why is it ethical to use the Homeland Security Bill
to force people under threat of imprisonment, fine, or quarantine
to take these same untested medicines?
The
Bush administration is perpetrating a pharmaceutical scam justified
by the “war on terror,” rewarding the pharmaceuticals
for the $262 million they invested to get Bush elected, more than
any other industry. The bill substantially enriches the pharmaceuticals
by creating a virtually endless supply of cash for the creation
of untested drugs and vaccines to be warehoused for possible use
against the public. Tommy Thompson’s stated goal is that every
“American man, woman and child will have a vaccine with their
name on it” and hundreds of million of dollars are being invested
to bring that goal to reality even as the deaths and injuries in
the current program continue to mount. He has stated that even one
case of smallpox will unleash a massive program of forced vaccination
through the Homeland Security Bill, vaccinating or quarantining
every American to “protect” them from the uncontrolled
threat. But there is no historical precedent or evidence to support
the notion that one person infected with smallpox will set off an
chain reaction infecting millions and millions of people. A compliant
media disseminates every myth the government feeds it without checking
any sources or seeking precedents.
A
tragic situation has been created in which the best scenario for
the American people is that their money will be wasted by letting
these untested vaccines remain forever warehoused, although the
best scenario would have been not to create them in the first place
and instead spend the money on real health-care problems. But the
precedent was set when they pulled the 40-year-old smallpox vaccine
out of the warehouse without even a hint of a threat of smallpox
attack, released it on the U.S. population, making the Bush administration
the real bioterrorist. As Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration
of Independence and physician to George Washington, said ten years
before the creation of the smallpox vaccine, “Unless we put
medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine
will organize into an undercover dictatorship.”
Lynne
Born has been an independent medical researcher, writer, and health
activist for 20 years. She also works at a consumer advocacy law firm
that specializes in pharmaceutical fraud.