According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world's leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals), if an individual has had five consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the years studied) his/her chances of getting Alzheimer's Disease is ten times higher than if they had one, two or no shots. 

I asked Dr. Fudenberg why this was so and he said it was due to the mercury and aluminum that is in every flu shot (and most childhood shots). The gradual mercury and aluminum buildup in the brain causes cognitive dysfunction.

Is that why alzheimer's is expected to quadruple?

It isn't often that federal bureaucrats admit to embarrassment, but the New York Times reported on October 23 that it was "highly embarrassing to federal health officials" to have to admit the "causal association" between the RotaShield rotavirus vaccine and the painful condition called intussusception. The embarrassment was aggravated "in part because the vaccine was 23 years in development and much of the work was done at the National Institutes of Health."

 The government's formal position until October 22 had been that all infants in the United States should receive three doses of the vaccine, at 2, 4 and 6 months of age, although caution was expressed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on July 15 and the manufacturer withdrew the vaccine from the market on October 15.

 CDC immunization spokesman Dr. John Livengood said that the health officials' decision to withdraw the vaccine recommendation reflected a stepped-up review of scientific evidence, which showed that the rotavirus vaccine appeared to cause intussusception in about 1 in 5,000 recipients, and that vaccinated babies were 25 times as likely to develop intussusception three to seven days after the first dose as those who did not receive it.

What is so shocking about this admission is that the high rate of intussusception was known before FDA approval in August 1998. The raw data were kept secret and the CDC went ahead with its recommendation.

Another disturbing piece of news is that, of the federal health advisory panel's 12 members, only 4 voted, all for the recommendation to withdraw use of the vaccine. We are told that the others were absent "because of emergencies or abstained because of ties to the manufacturer or other conflicts of interest."

It is unacceptable that members of the advisory panel are permitted to have conflicts of interests, and it's no answer to say they merely don't vote on the decisions where their conflict of interest is immediate. Panel members should represent the public, not be beholden to the pharmaceutical companies or the CDC.

All the raw data supporting any vaccine recommendation should be made public so they can be reviewed by disinterested parties. Many infants would have been saved from the intussusception tragedy if the raw data about the rotavirus tests had been available to the public.

We are long overdue for a Congressional investigation to educate the public about the current process of mandating vaccines, the secrecy about raw data, the failure to do risk and cost-benefit analysis, and the role of the pharmaceutical corporations in lobbying for mandates. The American people have a right to know exactly how and why the CDC disregarded the danger signals in the test data and recommended the rotavirus vaccine anyway.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has urged Congress to investigate the process by which vaccines are approved and recommended. The public is entitled to know if government approval is a political rather than a scientific decision, as well as the fact that government mandates are what make vaccines so commercially profitable.

Parents are beginning to fear that the real clinical tests may be post-mandate instead of pre-mandate. When the CDC can conceal the raw data about the pre-tests and reveal only summary statistics, it's easy to distort the results, recommend a vaccine for all infants, and make the universal use of the vaccine the real test.

This process amounts to experimentation on humans without telling the recipients or their parents that the vaccine is experimental. President Clinton poured gasoline on the fires of this vaccine scandal on September 30 when he issued Executive Order 13139 requiring military personnel to receive experimental vaccines that don't even have FDA approval.

It appears that EO 13139 is an attempt to finesse Pentagon responsibility for administering the controversial anthrax vaccine to all military personnel. The Defense Department has been inoculating for inhalational anthrax even though the only FDA approval, issued nearly 30 years ago, was only for cutaneous anthrax (contact through touch).

Hundreds of servicemen (including dozens of pilots) have resigned rather than submit to the anthrax vaccine because they have observed or heard about adverse reactions in many of their peers. Dozens of military personnel have been prosecuted and punished for refusing to be inoculated, and more than 1,000 are now awaiting trial.

Infants and military personnel are two groups of Americans subject to medical decisions made by others. Is our government using those two groups for human experimentation with inadequately tested drugs?

For weeks, Belkin and his wife agonized over what they might have done differently. What he couldn't get out of his mind was that a few hours before Lyla's death, she had been inoculated with the Hepatitis B vaccine. Most doctors he spoke to scoffed at the idea. The vaccine is safe, they said. But he began his own investigation, and he became disturbed by what he found.  He spoke to Bonnie Dunbar, a molecular biologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Five years earlier, her brother had experienced multiple sclerosis-like symptoms following vaccination. "His problems have been attributed to the Hepatitis B vaccine by over a dozen different specialists of unquestionable medical expertise," she testified before the Texas Public Health Board. "He has now been rated permanently and totally impaired. His health care has cost the state of Texas around half a million dollars to date." Then disaster struck again. A student in her lab, who was required to take the vaccine, "went partially blind following her first booster injection, a medical condition that was exacerbated by her second booster which resulted in long-term hospitalization."

Only a few years ago, Dr. Dunbar was honored by the National Institutes of Health for her vaccine work. Nonetheless, she began her testimony with this eye-opener: "I am not here today as an official representative of Baylor College of Medicine but as a concerned citizen of Texas and the United States. In fact, I am sure that some of my colleagues would not approve of my appearance. Especially those that are benefiting handsomely from pharmaceutical company income as consultants and expert witnesses while carrying out vaccine clinical trials."

Merck & Co. derives $900 million per annum from vaccine sales. Its Hepatitis B vaccine is the first in the country to use recombinant DNA technology. Since 1991, Hepatitis B inoculations have been givenroutinely to infants in the US, and 36 states now require that a series of three shots be given to infants as a condition of attending school.  Although many are now getting the vaccine, hardly anyone in the general population is at risk for the disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says that in 1996 a total of 10,637 cases of the disease were reported in the US, of whom 279 were below age 14. In 90 percent of cases, antibodies are naturally produced and after a flu-like illness the patient recovers and is immune for life.

To drum up a Hepatitis B scare, and justify the massive vaccination program, the CDC has arbitrarily multiplied the number of reported cases by 20, using the argument that most go undiagnosed. The general population is not at risk for Hepatitis B. The profile of those who are is similar to those at risk for AIDS. CDC identifies the hepatitis risk groups as: drug addicts, homosexuals and heterosexuals with multiple partners, children of immigrants from certain areas, health-care workers, and infants born to infected mothers. So how come everyone is urged to get the vaccination, including newborns, and why are state health departments playing along, agreeing that children can't go to school if they don't get their shots?

Shouldn't legislatures at least wait for the results before they make shots compulsory? The problem is that most legislators, like most journalists, are cowed by assertions of medical expertise, and by threats that any delay will jeopardize the nation's health. The New York Times in particular has acted as an uncritical conveyer-belt from the CDC to the general public. One politician who has stood firm is New Jersey's Christie Todd Whitman. She refused to sign into law a mandate rushed to her desk by gullible legislators. In France, a similar mandate was rescinded last October because doctors saw what was happening and sued.

Having studied FDA's reports of adverse reactions in infants, CDC concluded that there were "no unexpected events." A leaked internal CDC memo suggests otherwise. A meeting at the agency in 1997 discussed "possible association" between the vaccine and MS and recommended a "case control study" with 60 days as a "reasonable time limit to use for the onset of MS post-vaccination." (Five days were enough to get the vaccine approved.)

Another CDC claim, that "studies show that these side effects are reported no more frequently among those vaccinated than among persons not receiving vaccine," cited only references dated ten years before the vaccine was available. Thus is science put at the disposal of politics. 

An Institute of Medicine report refutes CDC's claim. At least 100 published reports by physicians have attributed serious adverse effects to the vaccine. The truth is that CDC is a political agency which has become accustomed to disseminating public-health scares as a way of protecting and expanding its budget. Not for nothing was "Prevention" added to its title.

Recently, John F. Modlin, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Dartmouth and chairman of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, debated the issue at the University of New Hampshire with Burton A. Waisbren, an immunologist from Milwaukee. Michael Belkin took along a chart showing that, in New Hampshire alone, the 48 reported adverse reactions to the vaccine in children aged 0 to 10 in recent years were 16 times greater than the number of cases of disease (3).  There were four times as many child deaths (11) as there were cases of disease. Those shocking figures show how out of control the vaccination program has become.

Modlin said the critics were "uninformed," and flippantly suggested that attributing deaths to the vaccine was like blaming automobile accidents on the Cheerios antecedently consumed. "Whatever you do," he said, "don't let somebody try to tell you that Hepatitis B is uncommon because only 11,000 cases were reported in this country." In fact, he added, "I don't care" how many reported cases there are. "What's probably more accurate is extrapolated data." By which he means "hypothetical." It's as unscientific to deny causation, without investigation, as it is to assert it. Meanwhile, Modlin should disclose the financial relationship between the drug companies benefiting from his indulgence and the ongoing research at Dartmouth Medical School. In response to a question, he allowed that there was such a connection. "Scientists are increasingly supported by for-profit companies," the Wall Street Journal recently reported, "but a new study shows that critical fact is seldom revealed in published research." This is especially true in the medical field.

In his response, Burton A. Waisbren said that "the first thing that should be done is we should stop universal Hepatitis B vaccination." He added that "doctors, hospitals and scientists who [support this vaccination program] should be held responsible legally.… If all else fails, I think there is going to be a congressional investigation."  Without quite reaching his question, he asked: "How could an executive in a pharmaceutical company that made a billion dollars out of this experiment, and the director of a government agency impose an experiment -- they talk about a strategy -- this is an experiment." Because, he added, "they don't know if this is going to help the situation."

The forum organizer, Gerhard Bedding, is circulating a petition to rescind the mandate in New Hampshire. He describes the modern medical attitude as: "Here comes this poor unprotected baby. We need to get at it immediately to give it the benefit of our protection." It reminds him of the "Kill all the bugs!" outcry of the 1950's. When he sees today's CDC officers in their military uniforms, he is reminded of nothing so much as his childhood in occupied Holland, during World War II. ABC's "20/20" aired a good program in January. Articles have appeared in Science (July 31, 1998) Insight, Washington Post, Toledo Blade, Indianapolis Star, and elsewhere. In Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, efforts are underway to rescind the mandate or expand exemptions. Grassroots opposition is growing.