(Un) Informed Consent: A few things parents don't know about the measles, mumps & rubella vaccine - Part 1

Tuesday, March 01, 2016 by: Natural News Editors
Tags: informed consent, MMR vaccines, medical ethics

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(NaturalNews) I've been dismayed by the national brouhaha characterized by the Four Horsemen of Vaccine Hysteria: Fear, Anger, Blame, Hatred. (Story by Louise Kuo Habakus, republished from FearlessParent.org)

• The unvaccinated must be hunted down and punished
• Measles is deadly
• We need a federal mandate for the measles vaccine
• No exemptions for anyone

There's nary a mainstream outlet that hasn't jumped in and piled on. For a group of investigative journalists, health reporters, seasoned writers, and popular bloggers that claims to wrap themselves in the cloak of modern science, there's precious little scientific or even analytic thinking, let alone responsible, measured discussion. It remains to be seen whether mainstream journalism will grow a spine.

In the meantime, however, what concerns me is how little parents know about the combination measles, mumps & rubella vaccine (MMR).

I worry about informed consent.

In part one, We'll talk about the safety of the vaccine itself. In part two, we'll investigate what's going on with its manufacturer, Merck & Co.

Part One: MMR Vaccine Safety
Documentation of adverse events following vaccination

Start with the basics:

• MMR package insert
• MMRV / ProQuad package insert
• Observed Rate of Vaccine Reactions - Measles, Mumps & Rubella Vaccines from the World Health Organization
• Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System
• Vaccine Injury Table of the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
• The Pink Book: Course Textbook, chapter 12 (Measles) from the CDC
• Can Measles Vaccine Cause Injury & Death? from the National Vaccine Information Center

Measles can travel via neurons to your brain

Measles virus can present as three different forms of infection in the central nervous system. We've known that measles virus can travel via neuronal spread and enter the brain. It's called "axonal transport" and it's as fast as it sounds.

What is not commonly understood, however, is that it's not just the natural contraction of disease that's implicated. Vaccination can carry measles virus to your brain, too. From a study in the peer-reviewed Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology:

[A]ttenuated vaccine strain can traffic to the brain under conditions of poor immune surveillance.

Injection of MMR vaccine can cause the live measles virus to hop a neurological bullet train to your brain.

The Merck Manual acknowledges that vaccines can cause brain damage:

Encephalitis is inflammation of the brain that occurs when a virus directly infects the brain or when a virus, vaccine, or something else triggers inflammation. The spinal cord may also be involved, resulting in a disorder called encephalomyelitis.

The problem is that we don't know as much as we should, given the way we vaccinate children today. This 2012 peer-reviewed summary in the journal Progress on Health Sciences makes a similar point about the neurologic adverse events following vaccination:

In this study, the measles viruses were researched, but under the immunization program children also receive vaccinations with simultaneous administration of several viral components. What then occurs in the brain of a child? Presently, there are no studies in this area.

Old science?

When it comes to informed consent on the MMR vaccine, the package insert is a good place to start.

A colleague of mine calculated the average publication date of every piece of science in the package insert and came up with... 1982. We're talking roughly 33 years ago -- with some studies much older than that. Does it make you wonder...

How much of today's vaccine policy is based on yesterday's science?

Who's responsible for updating it? Making a case for R&D?

If large numbers of parents are doing this research on their own and calling for more vaccine safety studies, doesn't this make them pro-science?

Who, then, are the anti-science denialists?

Science from one month ago

This new study, "Safety of Measles-Containing Vaccines in 1-Year-Old Children," was quietly published online on January 5, 2015 by Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Here's the abstract and the full study.

The article compares the administration of MMRV ("ProQuad") versus MMR + Varicella ("Varivax") separately. The authors confirm that there are more febrile seizures in children who get MMRV as a single shot than those who get MMR + V separately but on the same day.

This is significant.

The separation of the shots is not the only variable. In fact, the separation of the shots may not be much of a variable at all since both groups are getting all four vaccine infections simultaneously. It shouldn't matter where on the body you inject the vaccine viruses since all four vaccine virus strains produce systemic, whole body infections, right?

So why is there a difference in health outcomes (i.e., seizures and possibly other sequelae)?

The vaccines are not the same.

MMRV contains nearly 10 times more varicella potency than MMR + V (this is available in the package inserts). The MMRV group is getting a much higher dose. It's the total dose of the vaccine that causes the problem. If MMR + V is safer than MMRV, then that argues that M + M + R is safer than MMR.

Keep reading to find out why combination vaccines require greater viral potency...

Read the entire article at FearlessParent.org.