By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com
The presumed intent of a vaccination is to help you build immunity to potentially harmful organisms that contribute to illness and disease.
However, your body’s immune system has been designed over the course of countless millennia to ward off infection naturally.
Infectious organisms do not so much invade your body, as take advantage of the opportunity provided to them by an already weakened immune system.
Vaccination is an atypical manipulation of the immune system that stimulates an artificial, temporary immunity and can also involve an atypical inflammatory response that leads to permanent immune and brain dysfunction.
When an antigen is injected directly into your body through a vaccine, and especially when combined with an immune-stimulating adjuvant, your IgA immune system (the one found in your mucous membranes, meant to fight off pathogens that are inhaled or eaten) is bypassed and your body’s adaptive immune system kicks into high gear in response to the vaccination.
Vaccine adjuvants can trigger unwanted “hyperactive” immune responses, as they can cause your immune system to overreact to the introduction of the organism you’re being vaccinated against, increasing the chance that self-tolerance will be lost, and the immune system will attack its own cells and tissue as if “other.”
It’s known that vaccine-induced inflammatory responses can lead to permanent alterations in brain and immune function.
A new report in the journal Lupus suggests “a rigorous evaluation of the vaccine-related adverse health impacts in the pediatric population is urgently needed.” Indeed, with so many children being frequently subjected to atypical manipulation of the immune system by vaccines that contain intriniscally toxic adjuvants along with over 100 antigenic compounds, such an evaluation is long overdue!
If You Follow the Recommended Vaccine Schedule, Your Child May be Exposed to Toxic Levels of Aluminum
As noted in Lupus:
“In some developed countries, by the time children are 4 to 6 years old, they will have received … high amounts of aluminum (Al) adjuvants through routine vaccinations.”
Like other adjuvants such as squalene, an oil based adjuvant used in many vaccines licensed in Europe (but not yet licensed in the U.S.), aluminum hydroxide is added to the vaccine to “boost” your immune response to the antigens in the vaccine.
An antigen is the lab-altered virus, bacteria, toxin or other foreign substances in the vaccine, which is what your body is supposed to respond to and make antibodies against to theoretically stimulate immunity and long lasting protection from natural infection. By using an adjuvant to hyper-stimulate your body’s immune response and force your body to make a high number of antibodies, the vaccine manufacturer can use a smaller amount of antigen, which makes production less expensive and increases their profits.
However, artificial vaccine induced immunity is not identical to naturally acquired immunity. Even when adjuvants hyper-stimulate the immune system to increase the antibody count (titers), there is no way to guarantee that there will be long term protection against disease because long lasting immunity involves stimulation of both cell mediated (innate) immunity and humoral (learned) immunity.
In fact, the FDA does not require vaccines to be proven effective (antibody-antigen affinity) before being released onto the market, rather, only that they are capable of producing a certain number of antibodies (titers), which is defined as “vaccine efficacy.” There is a big difference between proving that a vaccine is truly “effective” against development of infectious disease and demonstrating that the vaccine can stimulate a certain number of measurable antibodies (efficacy). Judging a vaccine’s ability to be protective by only measuring the numbers of antibodies in the blood is a semantic sleight-of-hand that has deluded most of the pro-vaccination public into thinking vaccines have actually been proven to work, which often they have not.
You could throw the chemical kitchen sink into a vaccine to “boost” antibody titers without it doing anything to actually stimulate long lasting immunity that is truly protective. Is it any wonder that experimental evidence suggests the simultaneous administration of even two or three adjuvants can “overcome genetic resistance to autoimmunity”?
Despite this, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not conduct appropriate toxicity studies during their vaccine safety assessments. However, there is reason to believe that vaccines and their adjuvants are quite toxic when administered to children, and the Lupus report highlights several of them:
“In summary, research evidence shows that increasing concerns about current vaccination practices may indeed be warranted … Taken together, these observations raise plausible concerns about the overall safety of current childhood vaccination programs. When assessing adjuvant toxicity in children, several key points ought to be considered:
- infants and children should not be viewed as “small adults” with regard to toxicological risk as their unique physiology makes them much more vulnerable to toxic insults
- in adult humans Al [aluminum] vaccine adjuvants have been linked to a variety of serious autoimmune and inflammatory conditions (i.e., “ASIA”), yet children are regularly exposed to much higher amounts of Al from vaccines than adults
- it is often assumed that peripheral immune responses do not affect brain function. However, it is now clearly established that there is a bidirectional neuro-immune cross-talk that plays crucial roles in immunoregulation as well as brain function. In turn, perturbations of the neuro-immune axis have been demonstrated in many autoimmune diseases encompassed in “ASIA” and are thought to be driven by a hyperactive immune response
- the same components of the neuro-immune axis that play key roles in brain development and immune function are heavily targeted by Al adjuvants.”
Aluminum is Only One Toxin Contained in Many Vaccines
Aluminum is a well-known neurotoxin that may lead to long-term brain inflammation, along with a broad range of serious health problems. There is overwhelming evidence that chronic immune activation (inflammation) in your brain is a major cause of brain dysfunction in numerous degenerative brain disorders, such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s,and ALS, which may explain the reported association between aluminum-containing vaccines and these diseases.
Writing in Current Medicinal Chemistry, researchers also noted that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines can carry serious health risks that have not been thoroughly evaluated:
“Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor. There is also a concerning scarcity of data on toxicology and pharmacokinetics of these compounds. In spite of this, the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted.
Experimental research, however, clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and thus may have profound and widespread adverse health consequences. In our opinion, the possibility that vaccine benefits may have been overrated and the risk of potential adverse effects underestimated, has not been rigorously evaluated in the medical and scientific community.”
And this is the overriding point that needs to be understood: there are many signs indicating that we are giving our children far too many vaccines, and that vaccines of all kinds may be far less innocuous than previously believed. The current one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates simply throws too many children under the proverbial bus, because we simply do not know what all these vaccines are doing to individuals with different genetic and biological predisposition to developing chronic inflammation in the body (which can be manifested by a personal or family history of severe allergy, autoimmunity or neurological disorders) or how different vaccines interact when given in combination.
So, while it’s known that aluminum is a toxic metal with absolutely no beneficial biological role to play when introduced into your body, it would be shortsighted and counterproductive to pin all adverse vaccine effects on this one ingredient. Different vaccines contain a number of different ingredients that can be toxic for humans and cause serious health problems, such as:
Vaccine Safety Studies are Clearly Lacking
The more vaccines are studied, the more apparent it becomes that proper vaccine studies are lacking. Vaccine expert and pediatrician Larry Palevsky has long pointed out that there is a major difference between naturally acquired immunity and vaccine-induced immunity. Depending upon the disease, obtaining natural immunity can have far greater benefits. However, this fact seems to be completely overlooked by vaccine policymakers in the United States, considering the CDC and AAP recommend that U.S. babies receive 26 doses of vaccines before age 1 (which, incidentally, is twice as many vaccinations as are given to babies in Sweden and Japan).
Dr. Palevsky says:
“When I went through medical school, I was taught that vaccines were completely safe and completely effective, and I had no reason to believe otherwise. All the information that I was taught was pretty standard in all the medical schools and the teachings and scientific literature throughout the country. I had no reason to disbelieve it.
Over the years, I kept practicing medicine and using vaccines and thinking that my approach to vaccines was completely onboard with everything else I was taught. But more and more, I kept seeing that my experience of the world, my experience in using and reading about vaccines, and hearing what parents were saying about vaccines were very different from what I was taught in medical school and my residency training.
… and it became clearer to me as I read the research, listened to more and more parents, and found other practitioners who also shared the same concern that vaccines had not been completely proven safe or even completely effective, based on the literature that we have today.
… It didn’t appear that the scientific studies that we were given were actually appropriately designed to prove and test the safety and efficacy.
It also came to my attention that there were ingredients in there that were not properly tested, that the comparison groups were not appropriately set up, and that conclusions made about vaccine safety and efficacy just did not fit the scientific standards that I was trained to uphold in my medical school training.”
According to Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the non-profit National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), vaccine injury is the result of a unique interaction between the host and the type and numbers of vaccines given to that person. In other words, vaccine injury and death is induced by a number of co-factors, including:
There is a tendency by researchers investigating vaccine injury and death to want to point to “one” cause as the reason for an individual’s vaccine reaction, or population-based chronic disease prevalence. This “sole cause” hypothesis is convenient because it is simple and easy to understand. It is also easier for people to think that action can be taken to “fix” the problem if there is only one cause; i.e., separate the MMR vaccine into single doses; take thimerosal or aluminum out of the vaccines, and so forth.
However, the problem with promoting the “sole cause” hypothesis when it comes to vaccination is that the rise in chronic disease and disability among our children, including autism, is likely caused by a multiple factors in any number of combinations. Therefore, by trying to hone in on just one cause, say laying all the blame on a certain type of vaccine adjuvant or preservative and ignoring the effects of increased host susceptibility and simultaneous administration of many vaccines at once or vaccinating children when they are sick, for example, we’re likely to fail in our efforts to accurately assess all of the reasons for the vaccine-associated chronic disease and disability epidemic plaguing our children today so we can take meaningful steps to curb it.
This is a major reason why NVIC has been calling for more than two decades for methodologically sound scientific research into the biological mechanisms for vaccine injury and death and a comparison of health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Recently, a new Institute of Medicine Committee has been appointed to look at the feasibility of this kind of study and here is what Barbara Loe Fisher asked the new Committee to consider.
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