Letter from America: Dr Allan Cunningham: September 26th: Deaths from Vaccine Preventable Infections?

Introduction: Dr Allan Cunningham gives his perspective on retaining some vaccines in children, but not all, and not making any mandates. I think a case can be made for healthy children not to have any vaccines at all as the incidence of the ones he mentions having are very small and the benefits of say, having a measles vaccine, is qustionable. Before 1980, approximately, no children had the measles vaccine. As he admits, the disease can be very unpleasant but healthy children usually go through it without complications and have lifelong immunity. Some holistic health practitioners believe getting childhood illnesses stimulates the immune system. Rudolph Steiner said the same thing and stated that there can be two main types of reaction: inflammation, which a natural disease facilitates and tumour formation. Denying the body’s inflammatory reaction may lead to more signficant diseases later in life. Polio is a separate topic and one can make a case for the vaccine. However, there is much evidence that many polio cases in the past were not infectious polio but neuro toxin poisonings, like with DDT that caused polio like disease but not polio. Most polio does not cause paralytic symptoms but parents can choose if they want to take the vaccine.

I recommend reading the book Turtles All the Way Down on the world of vaccines and the implications of the global vaccine agenda. Also Dissolving Illusions by Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk and Ideological Constructs of Vaccination by Mateja Cernic PhD.

DEATHS FROM VACCINE-PREVENTABLE INFECTIONS

Thomas McKeown was a physician and a demographic historian. In books and articles published from the 1950s to the 1980s he put forth the view that the growth in population in the industrialized world since the late 1700s was not due to lifesaving advances in medicine or public health but were due instead to improvements in overall standards of living, especially diet and nutritional status. (The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Nemesis? 1976…”The McKeown Thesis: A Historical Controversy and Its Enduring Influence” Colgrove, Am J Pub Health, 2002;92:725) McKeown’s dramatic graphs of the decline in deaths from tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, and measles prior to 1940 provided evidence in support of his thesis. Public health authorities have specifically emphasized the importance of clean water, sanitary waste management, refrigeration, pasteurization, and modern housing for the decline in morbidity and mortality from infections after 1850. (Rosenau, Preventive Medicine And Hygiene, 1921) The decline was truly dramatic, but in 1930 infections continued to kill. Since then, medical advances, particularly sulfonamides, antibiotics and vaccines have had a major impact and produced further reductions in morbidity and mortality from infections.

MEASLES: From 1953-1962 an average of 530,217 measles cases and 440 deaths were reported annually in the US. The measles vaccine was first licensed in 1963, after which the number of cases and deaths dropped precipitously. In 2004 there were no reported deaths from measles. (“Historical Comparisons of Morbidity and Mortality for Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in the United States” Roush et al, JAMA 2007;295:2155)…Actual figures before vaccines may have been as high as 3-4 million cases annually if underreporting is accounted for. My 1969 copy of Nelson’s Pediatrics said that before vaccines epidemics occurred about every 3 years in big cities and affected 90% of children under age 6. If such figures applied today there would be 19.44 million cases with 16,133 deaths every 3 years…My 2011 edition of Nelson’s Pediatrics reported a 1989-91 US measles outbreak of >55,000 cases with 123 deaths, a ratio of 1 death:447 cases over that 3-year period…A paper from the UK reported a much different ratio of 1 death:5000 cases in Western countries. (“MMR: risk, choice, chance” Fitzpatrick, British Medical Bulletin 2004;69:143)…Before vaccines there were 5 to 8 million measles deaths worldwide each year. (Rudolph’s Pediatrics 2011, page 1171) In 2015 it was estimated that there were 20 million measles cases and 146,000 deaths worldwide each year. (http://www.cdc.gov/cdcgrandrounds/pdf/archives June 4, 2015)

Not to be overlooked is the fact that an ordinary case of measles can produce a solid week of misery in an otherwise healthy child…Also not to be overlooked is the positive non-specific immunologic effect of measles vaccine whereby all-cause mortality and deaths from infections other than measles are reduced in regions following the distribution of the vaccine. (“Vaccinology: time to change the paradigm? Benn et al, Lancet Infect Dis 2020;20:e274)

OTHER INFECTIONS: Here are the annual average US deaths before vaccine/after vaccine introduction: Diphtheria 1822/0—Pertussis 4034/27—Acute Polio 1393/0—Paralytic Polio 1879/0—Invasive Hib 1000/<5—Mumps 39/0—Rubella17/0 (cases of Congenital Rubella Syndrome 152/1)—Tetanus 472/4—Hepatitis A 137/18—Acute Hepatitis B 237/47—Invasive Pneumococcal Disease 6500/4850)—Varicella 105/19. (Roush, JAMA 2007) For some infections the bulk of reported deaths occur in adults. If we look at deaths from invasive pneumococcal disease specifically in children under 5 there were an average of 154 deaths each year before PCV7 was introduced in 2000, 79 yearly deaths when PCV7 was given, and 50 yearly deaths after the introduction of PCV13 in 2010. (“Twenty-year Public Health Impact of 7- and 13-Valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccines in US Children” Wasserman et al, Emerging Infectious Diseases 2021;27:1627)…I am ambivalent about PCV vaccines because they do prevent some cases of pneumococcal meningitis in children, which can be devastating, but side effects from the vaccine are frightening and may include SIDS. I’m not sure exactly where the balance lies for PCV.

Based on the foregoing figures we can approximate the number of deaths that would occur each year in US children if we stopped vaccinating altogether: Measles 1300, Diphtheria 1800, Pertussis 4000, Polio 3300, and Hib 1000, for a total of 11,400 deaths annually. These are the vaccines I would retain on the routine preschool schedule…Figures for the other vaccines that I would not retain on the routine schedule are: Mumps 39, Rubella 17, Tetanus <10, Hepatitis A <15, Hepatitis B <25, Varicella 105, and Invasive Pneumococcal Disease 104. The total would be under 400 yearly deaths in children if we stopped this group of vaccines, a number likely to be balanced by the lives saved from avoiding adverse vaccine effects. Again, these are approximations.

By my reckoning, retaining Measles, Diphtheria, Pertussis, IPV, and Hib vaccines in the preschool schedule would prevent about 11,400 annual deaths in US children from these diseases. By giving no vaccines before 6 months of age we would likely prevent an additional 1800 to 2800 deaths from SIDS/SUID…I think parents should retain the right to decline any vaccine so that any mandates declared by public health authorities would not be absolute.

Does anyone seriously want to discontinue all immunizations for children?

ALLAN S. CUNNINGHAM 26 September 2024 Cooperstown NY 13326 USA