Immunization Research – Why This Doctor Reversed her Stance on Vaccines

UK based General Practitioner and homeopath, Dr. Jayne Donegan, was formerly a strong supporter of her country’s Universal Childhood Vaccination Programme.  In this article, Dr. Donegan explains the research that led her to change her opinion, and how daring to challenge the prevailing wisdom on vaccination nearly destroyed her career.

Having trained as a conventional medical doctor, qualifying from St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, England in 1983, all of my undergraduate teaching and post-graduate experience in obstetrics and gynaecology, family planning, child health, orthopaedics, emergency medicine, and general practice led to me be a strong supporter of the UK’s Universal Childhood Vaccination Programme.

In the 1980s, I used to counsel parents  who didn’t want to vaccinate their children against whooping cough, which was regarded as the “problematic” vaccine in those days. I was not one of those doctors who would gloss over unpleasant details. I used to tell them (as we doctors were told) that while there were adverse reactions associated with the vaccine, the chance of having adverse reactions from the pertussis vaccine were, at least, ten times less likely than the chance of complications from having the disease itself, and that the point of giving their child the vaccine was to prevent them from getting the disease. Indeed, I used to think that parents who didn’t want to vaccinate their children were either ignorant or sociopathic. I believe that view is common amongst doctors today.

Why did I have this attitude? Well, throughout my medical training I was taught that people no longer died by the thousands or hundreds of thousands from diseases like diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles due to the introduction of vaccines. At the same time, I was taught that diseases like typhus, cholera, rheumatic fever, and scarlet fever, for which there are no vaccines, stopped killing people due to improvements in social conditions (such as sanitation and clean water). It would have been logical to ask why social conditions were responsible for the decline in some diseases and not others, but the vast amount of information we are required to absorb during medical training causes us to accept information as it is taught rather than question or analyse it to make connections that might be obvious to someone else.

When my children were born in 1991 and 1993, I unquestioningly – well, that is to say, I thought it was with full knowledge backed up by all my medical training – had them vaccinated, up as far as the MMR, because that was the right thing to do. I even allowed my four-week-old daughter to be injected with an out of date BGC vaccine at a public health clinic. I noticed (by force of habit, I automatically scan vials for drug name, batch number, and expiry date) that the vaccine was out of date and said, “Oh, excuse me, it looks like it’s out of date.” The doctor answered matter-of-factly, “Oh don’t worry. That’s why the clinic was delayed for an hour. We were just checking that it was okay to give it, and it is.” I let her inject it. My poor daughter had a terrible reaction, but I was so convinced that it was all for the best, I carried on with all the rest of her vaccines at two, three, and four months.

That is where I was coming from. Even my interest in homeopathy didn’t dent my enthusiasm for vaccines. So far as I could see, it was the same process: give a small dose of something and it makes you immune. No conflict. So what happened?

In 1994, seven million school children were vaccinated against measles and rubella during the Measles Rubella Campaign. The UK’s Chief Medical Officer sent out letters to all GPs, pharmacists, nursing officers, and other healthcare staff, telling us that there was going to be a measles epidemic. The evidence for this impending epidemic was a complicated (and questionable) mathematical model based on estimates, which was not published at the time. We were told, “Everybody who has had one dose of the vaccine will not necessarily be protected when the epidemic comes. They need another one.” I thought that was okay since we know none of the vaccines are 100% effective. I did start to worry, however, when they said that even those who had had two doses of measles vaccine would not necessarily be protected when the epidemic came. They needed a third. You may not remember, but in those days, there was only one measles vaccine on the schedule.  It was a live virus vaccine, so it was like coming in contact with the wild virus, just changed slightly to make it safer. Since then, of course, the pre-school dose has been added because one dose didn’t work, but in those days there was just “one shot for life.”

Then we were told that even two shots of a “one shot” vaccine would not protect people when the epidemic came. Basically, we were being told that anyone could be vaccinated, have whatever adverse reactions were associated with the vaccine, and get the disease with whatever complications were associated with it, even if they’d had two doses of the “one shot” vaccine.  That didn’t seem right. At that point, I began to ask myself why I had been telling all these parents that the vaccine would stop their children from getting the disease and that vaccines are safer than taking the risk of catching the disease.

If you are wondering why anyone would have had two doses of the “one shot vaccine”, it is because the MMR was introduced in 1988. Many children had already been vaccinated against measles, but we were told that we should give them the MMR anyway as it would, “…protect them against mumps and rubella and boost their measles immunity.”

We were also told that the best way of vaccinating was en masse because this would “…break the chain of transmission.” So I began to wonder why we vaccinate all these small babies at two, three, and four months of age. Why not wait two or three years and then vaccinate everyone who has been born in the meantime, to “break the chain of transmission”?

Some things just didn’t quite add up. However, it is very hard to seriously question whether vaccination is unsafe or ineffective after such a strong indoctrination. The more medically qualified you are, the more difficult it is. In some ways, you are more brainwashed. It’s not easy, or, at least, it wasn’t then, to start down a path that might lead you in the opposite direction of all of your colleagues.

I read some books that could be described as “anti-vaccination.”  These contained graphs showing that the majority of the decrease in deaths from and incidence of the infectious diseases  for which we have vaccines (like the measles and whooping cough) occurred before the vaccines were introduced in the 1950s and 60s. I decided that I couldn’t just accept what these books were telling me, especially as the message was the opposite of what I had learned up until then. I needed to do my own research.  The graphs in my textbooks and the UK’s Department of Health Immunisation Handbook (the Green Book) appeared to show that the introduction of vaccines caused precipitous falls in deaths from vaccinatable diseases.

I decided that if I were going to sincerely challenge what my professors had  taught me at medical school, I would have to go and get the real data myself.

Accordingly, I called the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) and asked them to send me the graphs of deaths from the diseases against which we vaccinate from the middle of the nineteenth century (when we started keeping records) until the present. They said, “We don’t have them, except for smallpox and TB. We suggest you try the Department of Health.” I did. The Department of Health didn’t have graphs from the nineteenth or early twentieth century either. They said, “You’d better try the Office for National Statistics.” “I’ve already tried them,” I said. “They were the ones who advised me to contact you.” It seemed to be getting rather circular, so I called up the ONS once again and told them my problem. “Well,” they said, “we have all the books here from when the Registrar General started taking returns of deaths from infectious diseases in 1837. You can come along and look at them if you like.”

There was nothing for it. I had to go to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in Pimlico (London), with my two young children aged six and four in tow, to extract the information myself. The girls were very good. They  were used to travelling with me and following me around, and the library staff were very nice. They kindly gave my daughters orange juice to drink and paper and crayons to amuse themselves while I pulled out all the mothy old books from 1837 until 1900, after which, thankfully, there was a CD-ROM that could be bought at a great expense and taken home. It was the most unfriendly user piece of data storage that I have ever come across, but it was better than having to physically be at the ONS day after day. So I went home with all my notes and the CD-Rom and eventually produced my own graphs. I was startled to find that they were similar to the graphs in some of the books that I had recently read.

I was astonished and not a little perturbed to find that when you draw a graph of the death rate from whooping cough that starts in the mid-nineteenth century, you can clearly see a 99% drop in the death rate before the vaccine against whooping cough was introduced, initially in the 1950s and universally in the 1960s. I also realised that the reason the Department of Health’s graphs made the vaccine appear so effective was because they didn’t start until the 1940s when most of the improvements in health had already occurred, and this was even before antibiotics were generally available. If you selected only deaths in under 15 year-olds, the drop is even more dramatic. By the time whooping cough vaccine was part of the universal immunisation schedule in the early 1960s, all the hard work had already been done.

I now began to realise that graphs such as those featured in the in the Department of Health, Green Book  were not a good or clear way of showing the changes in mortality (death) and morbidity (incidence of disease) that occurred before and after vaccination was introduced against these diseases.

Measles presented a similar pattern. The Department of Health Green Book features a graph that does not start until the 1940s. There appears to be great drop in the number of cases after the measle vaccine was introduced in 1968, but looking at a graph that goes back to the 1900s you can see that the death rate – death being the worst case complication of a disease – had dropped by 99% by the time the vaccine was put on the schedule. Looking specifically at under 15-year-olds, there was a virtual 100% decline in deaths from measles between 1905 and 1965 – three years before the measles vaccine was introduced in the UK.

In the late 1990s, there was a UK advertisement for the MMR vaccine, which featured a baby in nappies sitting on the edge of a cliff with a lion prowling on the other side and a voiceover saying, “No loving parent would deliberately leave their baby unprotected and in danger.”  I think it would have been more scientific to put one of the graphs using information from the ONS in the advert. Then parents would have had a greater chance of making an informed choice, rather than being coerced by fear.

When you visit your doctor to discuss the vaccination issue and you come away feeling scared, this is because you are picking up how they feel. If all you have is the “medical model” for disease and health, all you know is that there is a hostile world out there and if you don’t have vaccines, antibiotics, and 100% bactericidal handwash, you will have no defence at all against all those germs surrounding you and your children. Your child may be okay when they get the measles, but you can never tell when disaster will strike, and they may be left disabled or dead by the random hand of fate. I thought like that myself, and when the awful realisation began to dawn on me that vaccines weren’t all they were cracked up to be, I started looking in a panic for some other way of protecting my children and myself – some other magic bullet.

My long, slow journey researching the vaccination disease ecology involved learning about other models and philosophies of health and the gradual realisation that it was true what people had told me all along, that “health is the only immunity.” We don’t need protecting from out there. We get infectious diseases when our body needs to have a periodic clean out. Children especially benefit from childhood spotty rashes, or “exanthems” as they are called, in order to make appropriate developmental leaps. When we have fevers, coughs, and rashes, we need to treat them supportively, not suppressively. In my experience, the worst complications of childhood infections are caused by standard medical treatment, which involves suppressing all the symptoms.

What is the biggest obstacle to doctors even entertaining the possibility that the Universal Childhood Vaccination Program may not the unmitigated success that it is portrayed to be? Or that there may be other ways of achieving health that are better and longer lasting?  Possibly it is the fear of stepping out of line and being seen to be different – with all the consequences that this can entail as I know from personal experience.

It is very hard for doctors to start seriously questioning medical training that might lead them in the opposite direction to the healthcare system in which they work.  Yet this is what I did when in the interests of fair play I agreed to act as an expert for two mothers who could find no one else acceptable to the court, in a case brought by absent fathers who wished to force vaccination for their daughters.

Although I am an expert in my knowledge of vaccination and disease ecology, I am not an expert in being cross-examined by hostile barristers. I presented evidence to show that the vaccines are neither so safe nor so effective as generally believed. The experts called on the father’s side, who sat on a committee recommending vaccination, an obvious conflict of interest, presented an opposite view.  The judge swept aside my evidence, which an appeal judge called “junk science.”

Having heard about the furore via the BBC, the General Medical Council (GMC) accused me of serious professional misconduct and of bringing the profession into disrepute, threatening to strike me off the medical register, which would have destroyed my career and my livelihood.

It was a stressful and drawn out case that lasted more than three years.  Ultimately and thankfully, the GMC panel found me not guilty and agreed in their findings that my research and conclusions had been objective, independent, and unbiased.  Although happily, fully vindicated, it is not an exercise I would like to repeat.

It never has been, nor would it ever be, my intention to advise any parent not to vaccinate their child. However, I strongly feel  that parents should be entitled to a full range of information before making their own decisions.  That is why I give public seminars around the UK, including at CNM, the College of Naturopathic Medicine, where I review the impact, efficacy, and safety of vaccinations, and look at what options could be available to families who do not choose vaccination.

Author:

Dr. Jayne Donegan MBBS DRCOG DCH DFFP MRCGP MFHom UK based GP & Homeopath, Dr Jayne Donegan trained as a conventional medical doctor, qualifying from St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, England, in 1983. She has experience in Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Family Planning, Child Health, Orthopaedics, Emergency Medicine and General Practice. She is also a Homeopath, specialising in childhood issues, and is the author of numerous papers such as ‘Vaccinatable Diseases and their Vaccines’. jayne-donegan.co.uk Click through to the website of CNM  (College o f Naturopathic Medicine) naturopathy-uk.com in order to see some of Dr. Donegan’s UK speaking dates.

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What Vaccines and GMOs Have in Common

Vaccines and GMOs have more in common than many people realize. Both the biotech and the pharmaceutical industry use the same arguments to get you to accept their products. If you are against GMOs or vaccines, then you must be anti-science!

Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the people who research vaccines and GMOs who turn against them. In today’s busy world, most people don’t feel that they have the time to research every product. A desire for convenience and a touch of apathy motivates people to trust the government to guarantee the safety of our products. The same people who claim that they don’t trust their government paradoxically trust the FDA, the USDA, and the CDC. What most people don’t know is that the same studies that the regulators use to verify product safety are funded by industry. Those who stand to benefit the most from product approval are the same ones doing studies that verify safety for vaccines and GMOs.

An Informed Opinion Leads to a Predictable Point of View

That old adage, “When we know better we do better,” holds true for both vaccines and GMOs, and some of us know better than others. More often than not, it is the highly educated who refuse vaccines and buy organic. The political elite is no exception.

While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both espouse the benefits of GMOs, neither Hillary nor President Obama actually eat them. The White House doesn’t serve GMOs, and this elitism is not limited to Democrats. Both George Bush and Mitt Romney have strong ties to Monsanto, and both also only eat organic foods. If GMOs are not good enough for them, then why would they be good enough for you and your family?

It is the Highly Educated Who Refuse Vaccines

When it comes to vaccines, the situation is markedly similar. In Germany, a safer vaccine was offered to the politicians, soldiers, and civil servants than the rest of the population. Amid fears of a swine flu epidemic, the German government ordered the Pandemrix vaccine for the German public and the Celvapan vaccine for government officials and the military. Both vaccines vaccinated for the same disease; one was simply safer than the other.

Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) revealed that most of his children are not vaccinated.

I believe it’s the parents’ decision whether to immunize or not. And so I’m looking at my wife — most of our children, we didn’t immunize. They’re healthy. Of course, home schooling, we didn’t have to get the mandatory immunization.

The higher someone’s formal education and the more informed someone is about vaccines, the more likely they are to refuse them. Many former pharmaceutical employees refuse to vaccinate their children.

An education, whether formal or informal, changes you forever. When it comes to vaccines or GMOs, a little knowledge can go a long way. It is the same people who have read the vaccine warning labels and the people who learn about vaccine ingredients who invariably refuse them for their children. The more you know about GMOs, the less likely you are to eat them as well.

If knowledge is power, ignorance is powerlessness. It is ignorant to believe that we don’t need to know what is in our food because we are too scared of science. It is just as ignorant to believe that vaccines simultaneously work so incredibly well, and yet so phenomenally badly that everyone must have them. As GMO activists struggle to educate the world about what is in their unlabeled food, anti-vaxxers struggle to educate others about what is in vaccines.

The Same Struggle by Different Names

The struggles against GMOs and vaccines are intrinsically linked, and yet what happens more often than not, is that these activists fight against billion dollar companies alone, when the fight is essentially the same and the industries that oppose them are essentially the same people as well.

GMO activists want GMOs labeled for the same reason that anti-vaxxers oppose mandatory vaccines. They all want control over what is to be put in their bodies, or the bodies of their children. Admittedly, in vaccines, the struggle over labels is slightly different. Instead of having vaccines labeled (though some of the labeling is intentionally ambiguous) there is a push to get others to read the ingredients, and to read the warning labels. Most people refuse to even discuss what’s in a vaccine or the known risks involved in vaccination. One of the many known risks to vaccination is death. Dying from a vaccine or being permanently disabled is far more likely than dying or being disabled from the disease that the vaccine is supposed to prevent. This may sound hard to believe, but this is easily verifiable. Mortality statistics for all diseases are easily found by searching the Internet. For instance, measles hasn’t killed anyone in the U.S. in decades, but the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System admits to 329 deaths from the vaccine, and almost 7,000 serious adverse reactions. (Numbers for adverse reactions are most likely low due to underreporting.) The question becomes what’s worse, the disease or the vaccine? To those who know how to do the research, the answer is obvious.

Both of These Industries Want You To Trust Their Products and Not To Do Your Own Research

The majority of those opposed to vaccines and GMOs are highly educated. These people are not anti-science, they embrace the pro-precautionary principle. A good definition and description of the precautionary principle quoted from Mindfully.org follows:

When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

Key elements of the principle include taking precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; exploring alternatives to possibly harmful actions; placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on victims or potential victims of the activity; and using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle – including the public right to informed consent.

…Sometimes if we wait for proof it is too late. Scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are very high. For example, smoking was strongly suspected of causing lung cancer long before the link was demonstrated conclusively that is, to the satisfaction of scientific standards of cause and effect. By then, many smokers had died of lung cancer. But many other people had already quit smoking because of the growing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. These people were wisely exercising precaution despite some scientific uncertainty.

Often a problem – such as a cluster of cancer cases or global warming – is too large, its causes too diverse, or the effects too long-term to be sorted out with scientific experiments that would prove cause and effect. It’s hard to take these problems into the laboratory. Instead, we have to rely on observations, case studies or predictions based on current knowledge.

According to the precautionary principle, when reasonable scientific evidence of any kind gives us good reason to believe that an activity, technology or substance may be harmful, we should act to prevent harm. If we always wait for scientific certainty, people may suffer and die, and damage to the natural world may be irreversible.

Rather than conduct (or publish) long-term independent studies, both the biotech and the pharmaceutical industries opt to do their own short-term studies. They also both successfully lobby governments for special protection from liability.

In 1986 a law was enacted making it illegal to sue vaccine manufacturers: The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. This law established a vaccine court, a system that will only compensate families for known vaccine reactions, and then far less than what actual standard liability would pay out. The vaccine court is funded by taxes on vaccines, and so far they have paid out over 3 billion. This court is far from fair or impartial. They pay a maximum of 250,000 dollars for wrongful death from vaccines, and they dismiss 80% of all cases presented to them. Buying the claimant’s silence is a common stipulation to receive any compensation.

A provision was added to the Agriculture Appropriations Bill that serves no purpose other than protecting the biotech industry at the expense of the public’s health. Specifically, HR 933, section 735 is the provision that makes genetically engineered foods immune from liability. This law has been dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law.

If the pharmaceutical and biotech industries thought these products were safe, then why did they lobby the U.S. government for immunity from liability? It stands to reason that they wouldn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying for special protection from lawsuits if the products were safe to begin with.

Industry Funded Pseudoscience

It is difficult to find truly independent research on vaccines. Most vaccine safety studies use all of the toxic ingredients that are found in vaccines for both the control group and the group receiving vaccines – the same adjuvants such as heavy metals, aborted fetal cells, formaldehyde, etc. The only difference between the “placebo” and the vaccine is that the “placebo” doesn’t have the attenuated pathogen, or the “placebo” is an experimental vaccine. Real long-term safety studies that study vaccinated versus unvaccinated or long-term studies that look at the safety of the entire vaccine schedule are never funded by the industry or the U.S. Government. The CDC has blatantly refused to study vaccinated versus unvaccinated because they know what they would find.

There is a similar situation with GMOs. All of the safety studies published by the industry are short-term studies, 90 days or less. The reason for this is that the harmful effects of GMOs typically begin to show up after 90 days. Neither the biotech industry nor the U.S. Government ever published long-term studies. There have been numerous studies conducted in Europe and Russia that reveal kidney damage, liver damage, cancer, and other health problems linked to GMO consumption.

Biotech and the Pharmaceutical Industries Are Separate in Name Only

Monsanto and Pfizer used to be one company, a pharmaceutical company and a biotech company. Pfizer and Monsanto still maintain close ties with both companies staffed by a revolving door of scientists and businessmen that switch back and forth between both companies and regulatory agencies. When you consider how pharmaceutical companies make money (the more sick people are, the more money they make) strong ties to a biotech company should be a major concern to the public.

Many people who are opposed to GMOs are pro-vaccine and vice-versa. These views are far from consistent, and any activist that is against one and for the other is an activist who fails to grasp the issues at hand. If an activist can’t tell what vaccines and GMOs have in common, they could be more of a hindrance than a help to their cause. In an effort to avoid dividing their followers, most anti-GMO and anti-vaccine movements avoid discussing anything they see as unrelated to their cause. This demarcation hurts both movements, as there is strength in numbers. When fighting against the influence and propaganda of companies that are worth billions, a united front would be far more effective. A well known, but often looked over fact, is that many vaccines contain genetically modified ingredients. If you wouldn’t want to ingest GMOs, then why would you want to have them injected into your body or your children’s bodies?

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