By Maria M. Lameiras
Vaccination: One mother’s crusade.
When Barbara Loe Fisher took her healthy two-and-a-half-year-old son, Chris,
home from the doctor’s office after his fourth DPT (Diphteria, Pertussis
and Tetanus) shot, she watched his eyes roll back in his head before he fell
into a deep sleep. She carried him to his bed, where he slept for hours without
moving. When he didn’t wake up, she did what many young mothers do—she
called her own mother.
“Mom told me to try to wake him up. I went in and called to him and he
was unresponsive. I held him and rocked him in my arms before he finally woke
up, but he couldn’t sit up by himself or walk. He fell back asleep and
slept for 12 more hours before waking up the next day,” Fisher says.
What Fisher knows now she did not learn for more than a year and half after
this incident. Her son had suffered a classic post-DPT vaccine convulsion, collapse/shock
and mild inflammation of the brain that caused him to regress over the next
days, weeks and months. “He became a totally different child physically,
mentally and emotionally after that shot,” she says. “My family
knew something had happened to Chris, but we didn’t immediately connect
what happened after the DPT shot with his constant ear and respiratory infections,
chronic diarrhea, serious weight loss, failure to grow, new food allergies,
inability to concentrate, loss of developmental milestones and behavior changes.”
After a number of incorrect medical diagnoses over the next 18 months, Fisher
happened to see a television-news special entitled “DPT Vaccine Roulette”
in the spring of 1982, which detailed serious DPT vaccine reactions that had
been suffered by other children, including epilepsy, mental retardation and
death.
She watched the program with a dawning suspicion that her son had suffered a
DPT vaccine reaction. Years later, doctors would diagnose Chris with minimal
brain damage that took the form of multiple learning disabilities and attention
deficit disorder.
By contacting the news station, Fisher was put in touch with Kathi Williams,
whose 18-month-old son recently had had a serious reaction to his fourth DPT
shot. In April 1982, they co-founded a group originally called Dissatisfied
Parents Together, or DPT, and launched the vaccine safety and consent movement
in the United States. Now known as the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC,
909shot.com), the group is the world’s oldest and largest non-profit,
parent-led educational organization working to prevent vaccine injuries and
deaths through public education and defending the right to make informed, voluntary
vaccine decisions.
“Our original goal was to get a safer pertussis vaccine for America’s
babies. But after warning the public about vaccine risks for nearly 25 years,
we have learned that every vaccine carries significant risks for some people
and little is being done by industry, government or medical organizations to
minimize those risks. So most of our work now is focused on fighting for the
right to freely choose whether to take vaccine risks,” Fisher says.
In 1993, Fisher and Williams had decided to close the National Vaccine Information
Center because they were demoralized from years of fighting the wealthy and
powerful alliance of big drug companies, government health agencies and medical
organizations determined to silence their voices. Fisher had been invited in
the spring of 1993 by the late Larry Webster, a pioneer in pediatric chiropractic,
to speak to a group of about 200 chiropractors specializing in the care of children
in Boston.
“There was only $2,000 left in the organization’s bank account.
I didn’t really know anything about doctors of chiropractic when I flew
to Boston but, because I felt there was nothing left to lose, I decided to forget
about being politically correct and just tell the truth as I saw it. Little
did I know that chiropractors were pioneers in the fight for freedom of choice
in health care and old veterans at battling the very same powerful alliance
opposing us,” Fisher says. “Not only did I get a standing ovation
after I spoke, which brought me to tears, but I flew back to Washington, D.C.,
with nearly $8,000 in donations, which was enough to convince Kathi and I not
to shut down the organization. More importantly, we realized that we could tell
the truth without being afraid. Soon after I was invited to speak at a New Beginnings
Seminar in New Jersey and then Dynamic Essentials at Life College, where many
of the leaders of principled chiropractic came up on the stage to show their
support for our work.”
“That was probably the biggest turning point in our history because we
understood our fight was part of a larger fight for freedom of choice in health
care that was being waged by a brave and outspoken segment of the professional
health care community. Because of both the tangible and moral support of doctors
of chiropractic, NVIC did not just survive, but our lifesaving message now reaches
millions of people every year both in the United States and around the world
through our award-winning website, publications, media relations program, local
and state parent networks and other public information outreach efforts. Our
website alone gets nearly one million hits a year,” she says.
“D.D. Palmer once said, ‘Compulsory vaccination is an outrage and
a gross interference with the liberty of the people in a land of freedom.’
That was a true statement when he made it in 1910, and it is true today. Vaccination
is a medical procedure that carries a risk of injury or death. It is a big mistake
to think that if you compromise on something as fundamental as the freedom to
choose whether to risk your life or your child’s life for a vaccine that
you will buy acceptance from those who are trying to take away all freedom of
choice in health care. So I agree with B.J. Palmer who says, ‘Conditions
change, and our attitude toward them has changed, but principles remain the
same.’ ”
In addition to defending the ethical principle of informed consent to medical
interventions such as vaccination, NVIC acts as the nation’s watchdog
on vaccine research, development, regulation, policymaking and legislation.
NVIC also provides assistance to parents whose children have suffered vaccine
reactions and promotes research into the biological mechanisms for vaccine-induced
brain and immune system dysfunction.
Her own sense of responsibility for what happened to her son and a desire to
help other parents prevent their children from suffering vaccine injuries spurred
Fisher to embrace the cause of a parent’s right to be fully informed about
vaccination and be able to freely make vaccine choices.
“I was an educated woman from a medical family. I had worked as a writer
in a teaching hospital. My mother and my grandmother were nurses. But, when
it came to medicine, I was clueless about vaccines,” she says. “To
know that I participated in what happened to my son because I did not become
informed and because I trusted medical doctors without question is a difficult
thing to live with, even now. I held Chris down on the table so the nurse could
give him those shots because I didn’t know. I think it was the sense that
it wasn’t right that really drove me to write the book, ‘DPT: A
Shot in the Dark,’ which I co-authored with Harris Coulter, and to continue
this work all these years. I want to help people understand the importance of
becoming educated about diseases and vaccines, and to have the courage to stand
up and fight for the human right to informed consent to vaccination.”
The book, published in 1985, was the first major critique of America's mass
vaccination system, calling for safety reforms and the right to informed consent.
Fisher and Williams also worked with federal legislators to help create and
pass the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (909shot.com/Issues/Comp_Summary.htm).
In 1996, the center realized a major goal when the FDA licensed a purified pertussis,
or DTaP, vaccine for American babies.
Fisher feels the science and philosophy behind mass vaccination is flawed and
has potentially led to an epidemic of chronic diseases and disabilities in children.
“When I started this work, they were giving babies 23 doses of seven vaccines
by age six. Now they are giving babies 48 doses of 14 vaccines by age six. They
have more than doubled the number of vaccines and dose of vaccines during the
past 25 years,” Fisher says. “During this same time period we have
seen a more than doubling of cases of learning disabilities, ADHD and asthma,
a tripling of diabetes and a 200- to 7,000-percent rise in the number of autism
cases in every state.”
NVIC is working for wider recognition that independent, ongoing scientific investigation
must be conducted to define the biological mechanisms of vaccine injury and
death and to evaluate the chronic, long-term effects of multiple vaccination
on individuals and the public health. The center also is calling for government
funding of independent researchers to investigate the reported links between
vaccines and neurological and autoimmune disorders.
Although she does not maintain that vaccines are the cause of all cases of these
chronic diseases and disabilities, Fisher feels vaccines are a major contributing
factor in many cases. She also believes that children are being set up for chronic
inflammation that leads to poor health because their developing immune systems
are being atypically manipulated with too many vaccines. This may keep them
from naturally experiencing infection in early childhood that used to help the
immune system mature and become stronger.
“Public health authorities have decided that mass use of multiple vaccines
to eradicate or control an unlimited number of microorganisms will be the cornerstone
of their preventive health program because they believe the benefits outweigh
the risks for most people,” she says. “But the dramatic increases
in chronic disease and disability in American children during the past 25 years
has shown that more vaccination does not equal better health. This is the contradiction
they have yet to explain to the American people.”
Fisher contends that the current vaccine safety research being done is clinically
meaningless because it compared groups of vaccinated children against other
groups of vaccinated children. In many cases, the government or industry-funded
researchers use old medical records to come up with their findings.
“That doesn’t give any real answers about what is happening in the
bodies of children after they receive all these vaccines. There has to be a
comparison of vaccinated children to unvaccinated children to understand which
group is healthier over the long term. Vaccine researchers need to put away
their calculators and get out the microscopes and look at the cells and the
molecules to understand the difference between what happens in children’s
bodies after they are vaccinated and when they are left unvaccinated. They have
to look at pathology, at immune and brain function to understand why children
regress physically, mentally and emotionally after vaccination and which genetic
factors increase the risks for some children. But they won’t do it because
they are committed ideologically to a one-size-fits-all, forced vaccination
approach,” she says, adding that the multi-billion dollar vaccine business,
which is in partnership with public health and government health initiatives
worldwide, also drives the culture of mass, mandatory vaccination policies.
Those that speak out against vaccination or who advocate the right of parents
to informed refusal of vaccination are often marginalized or demonized, she
says.
“Vaccination is a sacred cow. You are not supposed to say anything negative
about vaccines because people might start asking doctors questions rather than
blindly trusting and doing what they are told. Public health officials like
to use what I call the ‘greater-good club’ to make it seem selfish
and unpatriotic to refuse to put your life or your child’s life on the
line with all the vaccines they have urged the drug companies to create and
the public to use,” Fisher says. “Americans deserve to be told the
truth about infectious disease and vaccine risks and be allowed to make informed,
voluntary vaccination decisions without being denied an education, health insurance
and health care or any other societal privilege. If we can’t decide what
we are going to risk our life or our child’s life for, then we are not
free in any sense of the word in this country.”
The center also supports the institution of an independent public oversight
mechanism to monitor vaccine research, development, regulation, policymaking
and promotion by federal and state public health agencies as well as independent,
non-governmental research into and monitoring of health problems associated
with vaccination.
“There are 200 vaccines in the pipeline and drug companies are committed
to creating them for widespread use without any concern for the potential downside
as if there were no risks whatsoever,” Fisher says. “I am not saying
that all of the increases in chronic diseases and disabilities among children
are because of vaccinations. There are other co-factors, such as exposure to
pesticides and other environmental toxins, poor nutrition and unhealthy lifestyles.
But there is no other intervention that has been applied universally in children
with greater frequency in the past two decades than the use of multiple vaccines
in the first three years of life when the brain and immune system is developing
most rapidly.”
Dr. Robert Davis, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
Office of Immunization Safety, says there are a number of initiatives in place
at the organization to address vaccine safety concerns.
“The immunization safety office was moved out of the National Immunization
Program’s offices more than a year ago to remove any potential for conflict
of interest within the CDC,” says Davis, who has led the immunization
safety office since January. “This was done in response to concerns that
the same branch that was involved in vaccine distribution should not be involved
in monitoring the safety of vaccines.”
The office has created four networks to track and study vaccines, he says.
The first is the Vaccine Adverse Reaction Reporting Service, a “passive”
mechanism that invites reports of vaccine reactions from any source.
The second is the Vaccine Safety Datalink Network, which connects the CDC to
eight managed care organizations around the country and is the CDC’s epidemiological
means for studying entire populations and whether vaccines are related to certain
adverse events within those populations, Davis says.
The recently formed Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network is designed
to identify individual, genetic characteristics that may lead to vaccine-related
adverse events, he says.
Finally, the Brighton Collaboration is an international collaboration created
to standardize how the medical and scientific communities define and study vaccine-related
adverse events.
Currently, the office is overseeing studies on vaccines and whether they are
related to developmental disorders or autism. The data from the developmental
disorders study will be released in 2007 and the autism study will be completed
in 2008, Davis says.
“As an organization, we are committed to addressing these concerns about
vaccine safety. It is true that serious vaccine adverse events can occur, but
when you weigh the risks and benefits, vaccination is one of the safest interventions
we have created as a society, in addition to providing clean drinking water,”
Davis says. “This is one of the things that has improved the quality and
longevity of life for the population as a whole.”
However, Davis agrees that continuing study needs to be done to ensure the safety
of vaccines and to examine how vaccines effect different genetic populations.
“What the human genome project has taught us and what we are finding is
that different people respond very differently to medications and we know that
genetic differences account for why some people are fast metabolizers of medication
and others are slow metabolizers of medication. This also accounts for why some
people respond worse or better to medications,” Davis says. “We
would like, as an organization, to collect the same information and do the same
types of studies for vaccines. We are beginning to address these questions and
we feel they are very important to assess. We are actually trying to design
and carry out these studies, but one of the problems with these studies that
we run into is that they are very expensive. It is one thing to want to do studies,
but it is another to find the partnerships and funding to have the studies done.”
Fisher says people are beginning to reject the notion that they must believe
everything they are told by medical doctors without question.
“The paradigm is now starting to shift. People are starting to realize
we have done everything medical doctors have told us to do, we have taken the
antibiotics and the antidepressants and the vaccinations, and we’re sicker
than we’ve ever been,” she says. “People are starting to wake
up and say they want to live a more natural lifestyle, they want to go to doctors
who embrace less invasive, less toxic healing modalities, and that is why chiropractors
are at the center of that paradigm shift.”
Fisher points out that studies have shown that one in three Americans now patronize
healthcare providers who are considered alternative or complimentary and are
not totally focused on the medical model.
“People are really looking at a more holistic way of preventing illness
and promoting healing and I think chiropractors are going to see more and more
people coming to them.”