A User-Friendly Vaccination Schedule

by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Part 1

Health information in the WA Free Press should not be construed as medical advice. Always make your own choice regarding medical treatment by seeking multiple sources of information and consulting with your personal physician.

Vaccination is a controversial subject, and many parents worry about subjecting their children to vaccines. Readers of my article "Mercury on the Mind," (see WA Free Press Nov/Dec 2004 ) about vaccines and dental amalgams, have asked what vaccines I would recommend their children receive. This article addresses that question.

In the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule put out by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 32 doses of vaccines are given to children before they reach the age of two. Providers inject them against hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus (lockjaw), pertussis (whooping cough), polio, pneumococcal infections, Hemophilus influenzae type b infections, measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), chickenpox, and influenza (the flu).

A 15-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the CDC decides which vaccines should be on the Childhood Immunization Schedule. It calls for one vaccine, against hepatitis B, to be given on the day of birth; 7 vaccines at two months; 6 more (including booster shots) at four months; and as many as 8 vaccines on the six-month well-baby visit. Before a child reaches the age of two he or she will have received 32 vaccinations on this schedule, including four doses each of vaccines for Hemophilus influenzae type b infections, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis--all of them given during the first 12 months of life. Seven vaccines injected into a 13 pound two-month old infant are comparable to 70 doses in a 130 pound adult.

This schedule states, "Your child can safely receive all vaccines recommended for a particular age during one visit." Public health officials, however, have not proven that it is indeed safe to inject this many vaccines into infants. What's more, they cannot explain why, concurrent with an increasing number of vaccinations, there has been an explosion of neurologic and immune system disorders in our nation's children.

Fifty years ago, when the immunization schedule contained only four vaccines (for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and smallpox), autism was virtually unknown. First discovered in 1943, this most devastating malady in what is now a spectrum of pervasive developmental disorders afflicted less than 1 in 10,000 children. Today, one in every 68 American families has an autistic child. Other, less severe developmental disorders, rarely seen before the vaccine era, have also reached epidemic proportions. Four million American children have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. One in six American children are now classified as "Learning Disabled."

Our children are also experiencing an epidemic of autoimmune disorders--Type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and bowel disorders. There has been a 17-fold increase in Type I diabetes, from 1 in 7,100 children in the 1950s to 1 in 400 now. Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis afflicts 300,000 American children. Twenty-five years ago this disease was so rare that public health officials did not keep any statistics on it. There has been a 4-fold increase in asthma, and bowel disorders in children are much more common now than they were 50 years ago.

Health officials consider a vaccine to be safe if no bad reactions--like seizures, intestinal obstruction, or anaphylaxis--occur acutely (i.e. in the short term after vaccination). The CDC has not done any studies to assess the long-term effects of its immunization schedule. To do that one must conduct a randomized controlled trial, the lynchpin of evidenced-based medicine, where one group of children is vaccinated on the CDC's schedule and a control group is not vaccinated. Investigators then should follow the two groups for a number of years (not just three to four weeks, as has been done in vaccine safety studies). Concerns that vaccinations in infants cause chronic neurologic and immune system disorders would be put to rest, and their safety certified, if the number of children who develop these diseases is the same in both groups. No such studies have been done, so vaccine proponents cannot say that vaccines are indeed as safe as they think they are. (One vaccine proponent, interviewed by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes, who has financial ties to the vaccine industry that he did not disclose, claims that vaccines "have a better safety record than vitamins." He neglected to mention that the US government has paid out more than $1.5 billion in its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to families of children who have been injured or killed by vaccines.)

There is a growing body of evidence that implicates vaccines as a causative factor in the deteriorating health of children. The hypothesis that vaccines cause neurologic and immune system disorders is a legitimate one--vaccines given in multiple doses, close together, to very young children following the CDC's Immunization Schedule. This hypothesis should be tested by a large-scale, long-term randomized controlled trial.

Rather than obediently following the government's schedule, there is now sufficient evidence, grounded in good science, to justify adopting a more user-friendly vaccination schedule, one which is in the best interests of the individual as opposed to what planners judge best for society as a whole.

New knowledge in neuroimmunology (the study of how the brain's immune system works) raises serious questions about the wisdom of injecting vaccines in children less than two years of age.

The brain has its own specialized immune system, separate from that of the rest of the body. When a person is vaccinated, its specialized immune cells, the microglia, become activated. Multiple vaccinations spaced close together over-stimulate the microglia, causing them to release a variety of toxic elements--cytokines, chemokines, excitotoxins, proteases, free radicals--that damage brain cells and their synaptic connections. Researchers call the damage caused by these toxic substances "bystander injury." (Pediatricians and other professional colleagues who question this assertion should read two reviews by the neurosurgeon Russell L. Blaylock: "Interaction of Cytokines, Excitotoxins, Reactive Nitrogen and Oxygen Species in Autism Spectrum Disorders," in the Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association [JANA 2003;6(4):21-35], with 167 references, as well as the article "Chronic Microglial Activation and Excitotoxicity Secondary to Excessive Immune Stimulation: Possible Factors in Gulf War Syndrome and Autism," in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons [JAPS 2004;9(2):46-52], which is posted online, with 54 references.)

In humans, the most rapid period of brain development begins in the third trimester in the uterus and continues over the first two years of extra-uterine life (by then brain development is 80 percent complete). Until randomized controlled trials demonstrate the safety of giving vaccines during this time of life, it would be prudent not to give any vaccinations to children until they are two years old. From a risk-benefit perspective, there is growing evidence that the risk of neurologic and autoimmune diseases from vaccinations outweigh the benefits of avoiding the childhood infections that they prevent. An exception is hepatitis B vaccine for those infants whose mothers test positive for this disease.

A user-friendly vaccination schedule prohibits any vaccines that contain thimerosal, which contains 50 percent mercury. Flu vaccines contain thimerosal, which is reason enough to avoid them. (See my article "Mercury on the Mind" for more on this subject.)

One should also avoid vaccines that contain live viruses. This includes the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine; chickenpox (varicella) vaccine, and the live-virus polio (Sabin) vaccine. This stricture would not apply to the smallpox vaccine (also a live-virus one), if a terrorist-instigated outbreak of smallpox should occur.

Finally, a user-friendly vaccination schedule requires that vaccinations, after the age of two, be given no more than once every six months, one at a time, in order to allow the immune system sufficient time to recover and stabilize between shots.

Which vaccines should be put on this schedule (among those that do not contain live viruses or thimerosal) is not entirely clear. The top four would be the pertussis (acelluar--aP--not whole cell), diphtheria (D), and tetanus (T) vaccines--given separately (not together, as is usually the case); and the Salk polio vaccine, with an inactivated (dead) virus, one that is cultured in human cells, not monkey kidney cells. Perhaps the schedule should only contain these four vaccines. A good case can be made (for example, see Gary Null's Vaccines: A Second Opinion) for avoiding the three other newer vaccines on the CDC's schedule--the hepatitis B, pneumococcal conjugate (PCV7), and Hemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccines.

Your pediatrician will probably not like this schedule. They are taught in medical school and residency training that childhood immunizations are essential to public health. As one pediatrician puts it, "Achieving adequate and timely vaccination of young children is the single most valuable thing a doctor can do for a patient." They do not generally question what their professors teach them, nor are they inclined to critically examine studies in Pediatrics and the New England Journal of Medicine that tell them vaccines are safe.

Part 2 of this article will appear in the next issue of the WA Free Press, and will deal with the positive effects on the immune system of natural diseases such as measles, and the reasons why most pediatricians never question public policy on vaccination.