The Science of Vaccinations
Scratch and Sniff
By: Jimmy Midnight - Feb 15, 2017
“I wouldn’t put it past ‘em.” That’s what I just have to say, about the motivation behind the moment, or moments, when vaccinations stopped being administered by scratch (“scarification”) and became medications given by SC (“subcutaneous”) or IM (“intra-muscular”) injection.
Without a doubt, in the 1920s and 30’s and 40’s, smallpox vaccines were still being given by scratch with notable success. But, spurred by western expansion into the tropics in general, and construction of the Panama Canal in particular, there’d already been a new scourge, Yellow Fever, alarmingly around for some decades. It was a difficult disease in many ways, with numerous investigators dying of the disease, and one group likely falsifying data in defense of a failing theory about spirochetes, before the causative agent’s being a mosquito-borne “filterable” virus became clear. (Bacteria and spirochetes are too big to pass this investigators’ “standard filter.”)
I’m actually old enough to remember getting a smallpox vaccination by scarification. It must have been in my late ‘40’s or early ‘50’s boyhood. It left a scar that was small and harmless, if persistent, in almost all cases—but I did see one online post about a large scar supposedly still shedding live virus “after all these years.” Skepticism is useful in any discussion of immunization topics. I can’t find my scar anymore, but do remember noticing it as a thirty-something.
What is clear is, that at a certain point, smallpox and Yellow Fever vaccines were actually being given at the same scratch. Then someone must have realized that scarifications used only a few hundredths of a milliliter per patient. But SC injection would require at least one cubic centimeter, (cubic centimeters and milliliters are identical volumes) something like twenty-five to one hundred times as much.
In the 1940’s, even cutting-edge researchers knew little or nothing about the immune-system role of leucocytes, T-cells of various kinds, or the lymphatic system, which, working together, make skin a powerful source of immune response. So the real possibility that going to SC/IM injection would also engender less robust, less consistent immunities was not even considered at Harvard, Yale, and the Rockerfeller Foundation, where the Yellow Fever vaccine was in the late stages of development, and whence came the first vaccine-by-injection recommendations.
But the notion of “economies of scale,” as in, “When ya make more of it, ya make more off it,” was very well established. The Supreme Court decision, in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, enabling state governments to order universal vaccination, was also firmly in place. So was someone’s simple human greed the genesis of vaccination by SC or IM injection? “I wouldn’t put it past ‘em.” But let’s also bear in mind that there was nothing more sinister in it than a simple profit motive.
Polio was also a dread disease, right here in the USA in the early Twentieth Century, so when the culmination figure Jonas Salk, finally developed an effective shot, he was widely and appropriately lauded ‘round about.
Polio is widely regarded, along with smallpox, as vaccination’s other “unmistakable success,” and in recent years the World Health Organization has pronounced it confined to Afghanistan and Pakistan. (There’s also some possible “elimination by definition” going on here, because it’s no longer “Polio” unless it’s serologically determined to be Polio, which typically won’t happen if patients aren’t hospitalized. A great many cases just exhibit flu-like symptoms, and in the wake of recovery, Presto! No Polio!) But it continues to present new cases and presumably to evolve in the wild. Sadly, it has apparently become endemic again in non-Assad regime parts of Syria in recent months. Fortunes of war, you know.
The natural sciences really are primarily concerned with the fallacy, or not, of the, “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” fallacy. That’s Latin for, “After that, therefore, because of that.” Another syntactic-go-round would say, “Correlation is not necessarily causation.” (Oh! And the poet sings, “One swan does not a summer make.”) On the other hand, if presumed effects don’t follow putative causes, there can’t be a hypothesis to test. So, to be clear about this, smallpox, in which immunizations were generally given by scratch, has been exterminated, whereas Polio, for which official medicine had moved on to SC injections, and then the Oral vaccine, though it has suffered a real beat-down, is still very much with us, even documentably proliferating.
So, a working hypothesis that states, “Giving vaccines by scratch leads to more robust, more consistent immunities, than an SC jab.” does at least have a “post hoc” to base it on. Furthermore, the role of skin cells, and the right-near-the-surface lymphatic system, which obviously weren’t even considered in the first half of the 20th Century, have been extensively studied now, so we know that a variety of T cells, cytokines, and really, I don’t yet know what all else, that are certainly activated by scratch, are possibly indispensable to optimal immune responses. (In the “knowing” department, I could learn a great deal more about all this, and still say, “I don’t know what all else,” as would cutting edge researchers in the field in moments of candor.) In bypassing those systems, or interacting with them in the anatomical hit-or-miss way that SC jabs do, patients may well be left with immune systems struggling around exclusively with the “humoral” B cell antigen/antibody system.
Just in the last several months, a new vaccine against Ebola viruses has been developed and tested in southern Africa, with what appears to be resounding success. The basic plan is to use it against local outbreaks, similar to the way the Yellow Fever shot has come to be used. Pre-positioned vaccines, ready to be deployed in outbreak situations, against a disease that is actually fatal in significant number of cases, how sensible!
But this new “success” must now be viewed with some skepticism, because of the partisanship at the center of any immunization discussion. Although I don’t doubt that this Ebola shot is actually useful, I find the claim that not a single vaccinated individual got the disease during a recent outbreak, just a little too cute, a little too shot-favorably anomalous. There’s a context. With over three hundred vaccines in development, the stakes in maintaining public opinion that’s favorable, preferably unquestioningly so. The natural sciences, and people working in them, can be politicized.
Where the smallpox, Polio, and Yellow Fever, (and now possibly Ebola) discussions end, quantitative questions about any shot necessarily begin, because other diseases for which they’re are available, just aren’t the kind of deadly threats to public health, killing or maiming upwards of twenty percent of victims, that smallpox, Yellow Fever, and Polio were. Here are a few: “Is it safe?” “Is it effective?” “Is it contributing to any sort of toxic overload?” “Is the target disease something we’re better served just allowing to take its natural course?”
All other diseases for which shots are currently available, at least usually, and in many cases almost always, disappear harmlessly in the wake of recoveries that follow decent palliative care. Many of them, for example, plague, anthrax, cholera, and water-born bacterial infections in general, have also more or less disappeared as us poor humans get access to clean water, and other e forms of basic sanitation. As an imaginable alternative to “all these shots” it would be relatively easy to develop “anti-serums,” from people who’ve managed successful recoveries from a naturally induced infection, as post-infection therapies for acute cases.
At the other end of this deadliness spectrum, we find things like the Human Papiloma Virus, Varicella (chicken pox), and MMR, vaccines against diseases from which nearly everyone recovers, with HPV being one of the most readily curable cancers, as well as something that is but rarely seen anyway. And measles and mumps and chickenpox are typical “childhood fevers” that may very well help their immune systems mature. Additionally, the anecdotal record strongly suggests that children very often experience “growth spurts” as a part of recovery, which reasonable people have attributed to temporary down regulation of immune systems.
But the MMR shot is at the very top, the pinnacle, of the toxic risk standings, by now so notorious that it’s worth asking what might be different about it that makes its use so risky. A possible answer that stands out immediately is that the Rubella component is being proliferated on a human tissue culture medium. Some misguided people become emotionally excited upon learning that the tissue’s source is lung fibroblast cells from a 1962 therapeutic abortion or a choice one performed in 1966 in the UK.
Their attitude is all wrong, and seems to arise from a paranoid vision of villainous white-coat types gleefully collecting all the dead babies, and happily buckin’ ‘em up with their little scalpels and saws to make more vaxx, evil grins on their oily faces throughout. Tissue cultures are generally started from single cells, as a way of insuring their genetic uniformity, something investigators hope will help them in obtaining consistent, reproducible results.
So these religious-based objections only make it harder to notice the real possibility that some protein, or nucleic acid bit, or nobody knows what-all else, present as an impurity or impurities in these antigen preparations, can evoke various autoimmune responses. And so many of today’s difficult health problems, Inflammatory Bowel Disorder, Lupus, RA, and of course most famously—autism, are more and more understood as autoimmunities.
We’d all be better served not insisting that there are singular causes for everything.
Autism was not even a recognized as a psychological condition until the ‘70s, but it’s now widely known and studied, as has been the case since the early ‘80’s. And it’s become increasingly prevalent since then. But no one can tell exactly how much it’s proliferating because there are partisan interests on both sides of the, “Is it getting worse, and if so, how fast?” question.
We need to take a moment here to draw a distinction between diagnosis and perception. Because there’s an interest in having people think that autism is the same it’s always been, it’s being over-counted as a newly popular diagnosis—a notion easy to accept for people who “never heard of it” in our growing up years. That’s the perception part. The diagnosis part actually isn’t different today from what it was in the early ‘80’s, and that’s a long time in the natural sciences.
Everything else I can discuss here is inescapably partisan, since there’s a meme going around that says, “The MMR vaccine can give kids autism,” so shot makers will do anything they can to make it seem that autism isn’t becoming worse or affecting more kids, while advocates of a less demanding schedule of required jabs will necessarily highlight evidence that points at ongoing or accelerating proliferation.
So there’s almost no point in trying to develop numbers here like, “In the early ‘80s, only about one in a thousand (Or was it in ten thousand?) of us were autistic, now as many as one in 45 (Or is it 33?) probably are.” That’s an impression that’s easy to get. Depending on the pages brought up, one could also walk away thinking, “Same as it ever was, we’re just seeing it more clearly.” I invite everyone to google, “Prevalence of autism history,” view the partisans in action, and form their own conclusions.
Unsurprisingly, it’s my considered opinion that autism is proliferating, and at an accelerating rate. I think it’s really a stretch to argue that it’s not statistically significant. It’s a dread disease, which condemns dozens, or hundreds, of thousands, to lives of dependence and doctor visits, and their families to devastating financial burdens. So there is a “post hoc.” Since every action is necessarily preceded by causation, we need to ask, “Is there some thing or things in kids’ environment now, as opposed to earlier periods when fewer of them exhibited this condition, that could be driving this increase?
A very obvious possibility is vaccine antigens being raised on human tissue cultures; and there’s also a working hypothesis about impurities in the form of DNA fragments recombining in very detrimental ways. (One of the cutting-edge researchers in this field, Theresa Deisher, is an anti-abortion activist, who actually played a role in preparing the “Planned Parenthood sells dead baby parts for profit,” video. How vile! How unpleasant! Does that prove she’s eternally incapable of competent research in molecular biology?) Another recent addition to our environment is Glyphosate residues. Monsanto’s patented weed killer is a reagent-strong chelating agent. Its vegetation-fatal action depends on its ability to bind Manganese.
Glyphosate will also bind just about any divalent cat-ion, which means a majority of mineral micro-nutrients like Zinc, Iron, Copper, though probably not Chromium and Selenium, not to mention the “major trace minerals,” Calcium and Magnesium. Zinc is very active in the intricate windings and un-windings of DNA and RNA at the root of all kinds of biological processes; and one working hypothesis in vaccine promoted auto-immunities is about recombinant DNA-fragment impurities.
Whatever the cause or causes, the autism numbers seem to be rising even faster just in the last two or three years, in the wake of Glyphosate’s recently adopted use as a de-greener in all kinds of non-GMO grains, presumably starting with wheat, rice, and oats. On the good news side, this practice is not going on with barley. It is said to interfere with the malting quality—imagine that. So, hoisting a cold one is perhaps in order.
All this points, not in one direction, but all around us, in the form of an atmosphere size cloud of toxic synergies—chemical, electrical, sonic, cultural, even the Sun’s output, as measured and seen on Earth, may have changed.
With all this going on, thirty six, or whatever it is, shots before the age of eighteen just has to be another pretty significant addition to the whole post-modern poison load. A list of their ingredients would speak for itself. The amounts are tiny, but they’re not necessarily insignificant. And I must add that giving them all by SC injection, a cumulative shock to immune systems, in which the T-cell component keeps just being bypassed, the effects of which are simply unknown, has become part of this sickening picture.
And that’s why the “herd immunity” idea on which mandatory vaccine laws are based is just so wrong, since the overall utility of it falls off very rapidly as immunities turn out to be less than complete. And it’s also possible that vaccinated people can shed live infectious virus, as documented in the famous Disneyland measles outbreak case. It’s generally suspected that the epidemic’s “patient zero” was a recently vaccinated Philippines tourist who was still shedding live virus. And at least a half a dozen fully vaccinated people were also infected. Now, is it possible that vaccinations among the always large Disneyland crowd led to fewer and milder cases? Possibly. What is clear is that it’s led sales-department Quacks to call for adding yet a third MMR shot to the public’s compulsory immune system burden.
But even if these shots were fully effective, most of us anyway, are living in the USA, and we have a Ninth Amendment in our Constitution and a Civil War in our History. Since the Civil War was fought against state governments, it means the power of State governments over us really shouldn’t extend to the point of forced medical treatment, since there’s a presumption that we’re mature and responsible enough to make those decisions.
Amendment Nine: Some versions say, “The enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to disparage others, retained by the people themselves, or the several states.” Other versions, which tend to have been copied at a later date, do not contain the, “Or the several states,” phrase.
I dare to hope it’s because the states part was subsumed as a result of the Civil War, but am more inclined to guess it’s just due to human sloppiness. The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision formally recognized a Ninth Amendment right to privacy, and it’s really not much of a stretch to extend that to some kind of “personal autonomy” right, giving Americans the choice not to submit to healthcare treatments. We may be at an Historically opportune moment to bring a case somewhere to attempt to overturn the Jacobson decision, which was actually informed by an ongoing smallpox outbreak, a form of urgency that doesn’t apply to today’s universal legal demands. In 1904, infectious diseases were the most feared cause of human death. Today, people typically recover from fevers and fear degenerative chronic conditions far more. We obviously can’t rule out the possibility that “all these shots” are contributing to that in some way.
Perhaps the notion could be “venue shopped,” looking for a sympathetic Federal Appellate court, maybe the one out there in Cali, because the Supreme Court is so likely to deadlock with a four-to-four tie, letting an appellate decision stand. And California now has some very strict forced immunization jab laws in place.
At that time, questions about the efficacy and safety of shots, and the rapidity with which herd immunity disappears when contagion rises, or when conferred immunities fade with time or turn out to be inconsistent, are likely to become part of the public record. For example, if one in thirteen of people exposed to the target disease will become infected, and the shot is ninety-two and three tenths percent effective, even the theoretical model realizes that a hundred percent of people, everyone, including inevitable groups for whom all immunizations are officially contraindicated, would need a shot to make herd immunity a reality.
Furthermore, American book law, case law, and common law tend very strongly to recognize an underlying, “Fundamental right to be left alone.” The Second Amendment right to bear arms has been construed for our time, even though the need for the militias referenced in its text has actually disappeared.
Whereas there is ample History-based rationale for bringing Ninth Amendment rights to the center of the struggle for freedom. What the Second and Ninth have in common is the presumption that Americans are sufficiently mature and responsible to make their own decisions, even if one of those is personally to own private arsenals likely capable of wiping out a Roman Legion or two. So are we not also capable of evaluating the risks and utility of vaccinations?
The US Supreme Court, in the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, actually declared that vaccines were, in Justice Scalia’s words, “Unavoidably unsafe.” It’s very telling that he was comfortable with forcing them on us anyway. In her dissent, which rested on parsing the word “if,” as opposed to what Scalia did by constructing a possibly ambiguous subordinaton of clauses, Justice Sotomayor signaled a stronger level of sympathy for shot-injured plaintiffs. Well, that how appellate court do decision making.
Scalia, in declaring vaccines, “Unavoidably unsafe,” actually absolved shot makers of responsibility to update their methodologies, so that, under current law, they have no liability beyond the excise tax charged on every shot. It’s supposed to cover vaccine injury claims, but, with a schedule that includes a $250,000 death benefit, the coverage is threadbare to say the least; and the fact that there is such a schedule at all, and a special federal court set up to handle claims, shows how common injuries actually are.
Liability is a significant cost for almost every business, and businesses absolved of liability seem inevitably drawn to high-risk activities. Besides vaccine makers, generators of nuclear power were given this sort of pass, and of course engaged in wildly reckless behavior as a result, for example building “fast-breeder reactors” that used liquefied metallic Sodium as a circulating coolant. Thankfully, these particular experiments have reached an end.
Is proliferating disease antigens on human tissue culture media the vaccine-makers, “Molten metallic Sodium as circulating coolant,” moment of liability-free over-reach? That’s hard to tell. What’s beyond dispute is that there are now over three hundred vaccines in various stages of development. What’s not to like about a business model in which liability is zeroed, state governments are ready to force purchase, and the national government stands ready to get between you and damage claimants, with inadequate compensation checks and condescending pats on the head?
In preparing this article, I learned that domestic ducks can be trained to do a few tricks, including repeating a phrase of two, similar to what can be done with parrots and crows. So let’s imagine an obviously overgrown white duck in a white coat, taught endlessly to repeat, “No risk in vaccines! Quack! Quack!”
The term, “Quack!” actually derived, not from waterfowl, but from the 18th and 19th Century practice of giving patients Mercury, yeah, the metallic and toxic liquid metal, Mercury, which was also commonly called Quicksilver in those days. Some actually recovered anyway, in spite of these clueless ministrations, which could never have done anyone a lick of good. Of course it was practitioners of chemistry-based medicine, Allopaths, who did most of this “Quackery.” It was a standard treatment for syphilis for numerous 18th and 19th Century decades, leading some people to think that doctors might also have had a punishment for the sexually active in mind. (Despite their, “First, do no harm,” pledge.)
Mercury-related quackery is sort of still going on right now, inasmuch as the “Organo-Mercurial” Thimerosal, remains integral to production of new-every-season flu shots, because it makes them a notch easier and cheaper, and, to be fair, faster, to produce. I hope nobody will even imply that I don’t understand the difference between elemental Mercury and Organo-Mercurials. I even know that the Thi syllable in the name points to a Sulfur atom in its chemical structural formula. I know they’re chemically different; but they have, high-level, toxicity in common. Ugh! You’re poisoned!
Due to the hue and cry about Thimerosal, vaccine makers replaced it as an “adjuvant” with Alum, which may or may not be even worse, another thing about vaccines we just don’t really know.
But we do understand that when immunization shots depend on a “fractionated” antigen, some “adjuvant” or other has to be added, or there just won’t be any antigen-antibody humoral response.
Well, I’d like to close this article with a series of recommendations for makers, doctors, and patients around these issues, but I’m not actually in a position to do that, so I suggest not taking the word of this one very bad old man for anything. Even reading them could get you into trouble in any country where the pharmaceutical industry is powerful, which is all of ‘em.
First, and above all, start giving shots by skin scratch instead of sub-cutaneous injection.
This alone, I dare to predict, would reduce the number of injuries by an order of magnitude, and confer more robust, more consistent immunities, reducing the need for booster after booster. This practice might end up leaving myriad small but persistent scars, which would be a worthwhile tradeoff, and clear indicator of shots having been given. It’s also possible that most untoward reactions would be seen and easily contained on surface skin.
Do not give, or get, attenuated live shots at the same time as fractionated adjuvant containing ones, because “amping up” attenuated live antigen with an adjuvant from a different shot clearly presents an additional unstudied risk.
Don’t give or take a shot in which any of the antigens is raised on human tissue culture medium. And while we’re involved with those, the MMR and Varicella shots may not be something anyone should be taking, as the fewer, less severe cases game, may very well not be worth the auto-immunity candle.
Forget about the flu shot, which is still made with that Organo-Mercurial Thimerosal. Haemophilus virus is naturally adapted to mutate more rapidly than vaccine-makers can hope to keep up with.
Medics should also look more carefully at producing anti-serums from people who’ve recovered from natural infections, and explain the real risks, and real upsides of all these shots. I think many people would be glad, realistically, to take their inoculations anyway.
Develop shots with the idea in mind of using them in outbreak emergencies, maybe only in outbreak emergencies. Then, for one thing, the hazard in which recently vaccinated people are shedding live pathogens, will become immaterial because the infectious agent is endemic anyway.
Much of today’s overseas philanthropy now involves vaccinating vast numbers of people in third-world countries. Gates Foundations' Bill is often quoted as saying vaccination is a population-reduction strategy. Then excitable shot opponents are like, “See, it really is a plot to kill most of us off!” All he, quite naively, meant was that women who are confident their kids will all survive into adulthood, will choose to have fewer children. “As if,” birth control was readily available! These resources would be more usefully deployed in bringing clean water and basic sanitation to these zones of deprivation. And overall costs would become comparable, as dozens of shots end up being recommended. Gates has substantial investments in pharmacueticals, not plumbing suppliers.
Is it possible that drug-makers already know they’re conferring poor immunities, and overloading immune systems, with all these SC jabs (Yes, it is a thoughtfully selected partisan word.) and yet continue to recommend them because selling more is more profitable, somehow rationalizing their bad behavior, like, “Fewer milder cases,” and “Partial herd immunity”? “I wouldn’t put it past ‘em” Because invested partisanship, as well as simple human greed is now behind it.