Page 79 - Summer 2019 Journal

Vaccination Updates
POLIO VACCINES: MEDICAL TRIUMPH OR MEDICAL MISHAP? By Kendall Nelson, Director, The Greater Good
Proponents of vaccination cite the eradica- tion of polio—declared in the United States in 1979 and in the Western Hemisphere in 1991— as “proof” that mass vaccination campaigns are effective. They credit polio vaccines as having single-handedly reduced polio incidence and use this as justification for today’s mandatory vaccination programs, which violate the funda- mental human right of bodily autonomy. What proponents of mass vaccination do not tell us is that the polio vaccine “success story” is riddled with failures and inaccuracies, both historically and today. These have largely been kept secret from the general public.
Poliomyelitis (or “polio” for short) is a contagious disease caused by an intestinal virus (called an “enterovirus”) that may attack the nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord. Polio mainly affects children under the age of five and is spread through contact with contaminated fe- ces (for example, by changing a baby’s diapers) or through airborne droplets in food or water.1 Poliovirus enters the body through the nose or mouth and then travels to the intestines where it incubates. Next, it enters the bloodstream where “anti-polio” antibodies are produced. In most cases, this stops the progression of the virus, and the individual gains permanent immunity.
PERCEPTION VERSUS REALITY
Many Americans can remember a time when children were prohibited from swimming in public pools, and newspapers published pho- tographs of victims convalescing in iron lungs. However, as explained by Neil Z. Miller (author of the book Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective?2 and director of the ThinkTwice Global Vaccine Institute3), these images left the public with a false impression. In a 2004 paper, “The polio vaccine: a critical assessment of its arcane history, efficacy, and long-term health- related consequences,”1 Miller wrote, “Many
people mistakenly believe that anyone who contracts polio will become paralyzed or die.” In fact, the majority of people who are infected with poliovirus do not become sick and are never even aware that they have had the infection.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently states that ap- proximately three-fourths of people infected with poliovirus will experience no symptoms whatsoever. About one out of four infected people will have flu-like symptoms, lasting two to five days, which may include sore throat, fever, tiredness, nausea, headache and stomach pain.4 About one out of two hundred people will have weakness or paralysis in their arms, legs or both; although this weakness or paralysis can last a lifetime, many individuals recover com- pletely, and, in most, muscle function returns to some degree. Among the subset of people with paralysis, the CDC says, between two and ten out of one hundred people die “because the virus affects the muscles that help them breathe.”4 Until recently (on a webpage that is no longer live),5 the CDC shared different numbers, as- serting that only 5 percent of infected people would show any symptoms; other public health websites continue to cite those numbers.6
FEAR TACTICS
In the early and mid-twentieth century, few
diseases frightened people more than polio—but it is important to remember that much of the fear came from false information about the dis- ease. Dr. Suzanne Humphries, an internist and board-certified nephrologist, wrote about polio fear-mongering in her 2013 book, Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History, describing how we were “indoctrinated to believe polio was a highly prevalent and contagious disease” from the early 1900s on, “despite the actual numbers of paralytic polio
Wise Traditions
Few diseases frightened people more than polio— but it is important to remember that much of the fear came from false information about the disease.
SUMMER2019
77