It is true that there may be situations where extreme measures may be justified to preserve life and health as the lesser of two evils. The basic question, therefore, is whether the benefits of current childhood vaccines outweigh the harm, or whether the reverse is true.

As to the benefits of vaccines, polio has been eliminated from the Western Hemisphere; smallpox may have been eliminated world-wide, although there are disturbing reports that it is still to be found in parts of the Far East.

However, vaccine proponents would have us believe that vaccines have been largely responsible for controlling virtually all of the former epidemics of killer diseases in the USA. With the exceptions cited above, the facts do not bear this out. According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, from 1911 to 1935, the four leading causes of death from infections diseases in the USA were diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough (pertussis) and measles. However, by 1945 the combined death rates from these causes had declined by 95%, before the implementation of mass immunisation programmes. By far the greatest factors in this decline were sanitation through public health measures, improved nutrition, and better housing with less crowded conditions.

It should be pointed out that today's children receive up to 35 vaccinations before school age, whereas today's senior citizens received only one, the smallpox vaccine. Most infants have been receiving up to 15 doses of mercury-containing vaccines by the time they are six months old. It is almost inconceivable that these heavy burdens of foreign immunologic materials, introduces into the immature systems of children, could fail to bring about disruptions and adverse reactions in these systems. It is reasonable to ask ourselves, therefore, what is known about these reactions.

A small but growing minority of physicians and scientists are becoming aware that safety testings for the various vaccines have been woefully inadequate. As one of many examples, a 1944 special committee of the National Academy of Sciences published a comprehensive review of the safety of the hepatitis B Vaccine. When the committee investigated five possible and plausible adverse effects, they were unable to come to any conclusions for four of them because, to their dismay, they found that relevant safety research had not been done.

The clear implication of this and other revelations concerning a general deficiency of safety testing in the vaccine field is that adverse reactions may be taking place on a large scale without being recognised as to their true nature.

There is a school of thought that the so called minor childhood illnesses of former times, including measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox, which entered the body through the mucous membranes, served a necessary and positive purpose in challenging and strengthening the immune system of these membranes. In contrast, the respective vaccines of these diseases are injected by needle directly into the system of the child, thereby bypassing the mucosal immune system. As a result, mucosal immunity remains relatively weak and stunted in many children, one complication of which may be the rapid increase, in both frequency and severity, now seen in asthma.

This concept tends to be confirmed by controlled studies in which vaccinated children have significantly more allergic disorders, including eczema as well as asthma, compared with controls.

It is true that in former times there were occasional serious complications from these childhood diseases, but most of these could be eliminated by nutrition, homeopathy and other simple means, if these approaches were made widely available. No one wants to see serious complications from diseases in our children, but the vaccine route may in time prove to be the worst possible choice that could have been made as concerns these minor childhood diseases.

Perhaps the greatest concern with vaccines today rests with their possible causal relation to the growing epidemic of childhood autism, development delay and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Regarding the latter, a recent report stated that ADHD has increased from 900,000 in 1991 to nearly five million today. Regarding autism, a recent statistical survey mandated by the California state legislature found an increase of 273% in California in the past 10 years. Reports from education departments in a number of states on the rapidly increasing needs of classrooms for developmentally delayed children reflect comparable increases throughout the nation.

At present, primary suspicion for this epidemic of neurobehavioral disorders rests with the MMR (Measlesmumps-rubella) vaccine. Although scientific evidence has not Yet reached the standards of proof, one pioneer researcher in this area, Dr Vijendra Singh with the University of Michigan, has published a report of a study in which he found that a large majority of autistic children tested had antibodies to brain tissue, in the form of antibodies to myclin basic protein. He also found a strong correlation between myelin basic protein antibodies and antibodies to measles, mumps and rubella (almost all of the children had been immunised with MMR, and none had had these diseases).

This study confirms the results of a similar study published in the Lancet in 1998 by Dr Andrew Wakefield of the Royal Free Hospital in London, showing a link between MMR vaccination and Chrone's disease of the bowel and autism.

If the MMR vaccine is causing an autoimmune reaction involving the brains of autistic children, what would be the mechanism? Although research in this area is in its infancy, as previously mentioned, we do know some things. Both the measles and the mumps fractions of the MMR vaccine are cultured in chick embryo tissue. As purely genetic material, viruses are highly susceptible to the process of "jumping genes" in which they may incorporate genetic material from the tissues in which they are cultured. Once this genetic material of chick origin is introduced into the child, it may set in motion an immunologic battleground, a process which the work of Dr Singh would tend to confirm.

A similar process may have taken place with the oral (Sabin) polio vaccine, which is cultured in monkey kidneys. Years ago Dr John Martin, then serving as the Director of the viral oncology branch within the US Food and Drug Administration, reported to his supervisors that he found foreign DNA in contemporary polio vacdines. He later learned that a simian (monkey) cytomegalic virus had been found in all of the 11 African green monkeys imported for production of the polio vaccine.

After leaving the FDA, Dr Martin took a position as professor of pathology with the University of Southern California. There he tested blood samples from patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, autism and other nervous disorders. This work lead to his discovery of unique cell-destroying viruses that were not recognised by the immune system. Termed "stealth viruses", these viruses were able to cause persistent infections because they were missing specific genes which, if evoked, would express immunity.

In March 1995, Dr Martin communicated to FDA officials that some stealth viruses clearly originated from African green monkey simian cytomegalic viruses. a type of herpes virus which may also infect humans. Dr Martin asked the FDA to help him investigate the prevalence of this infection in the general population and in polio vaccine lots. His request was denied.

In a long overdue move, on June 17th 1999, US government officials voted to withdraw their recommendation for the use of the live oral polio vaccine and to recommend "exclusive" use of the inactivated (Salk) polio vaccine. (Parenthetically, the Salk vaccine is free of the danger of herpes virus contamination).

In summary, it is possible that either the MMR or the oral polio vaccines, by mechanisms described above, may induce a process of encephalitis or brain inflammation, which may be highly prevalent but as yet not fully recognised for its true nature

In a Letter-to-the-Editor of Science magazine in October 1967, Joshua Lederberg, Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, warned about live virus vaccines.

"In point of fact, we [are practising] biological engineering on a rather large scale by use of live viruses in mass immunisation campaigns. While these are thought to be of indubitable value for preventing serious diseases, their global impact on the development of human beings of a wide range of genotypes is hard to assess at our present stage of wisdom. Crude virus preparations, such as some in common use at the present time are also vulnerable to frightful mishaps of contamination and misidentification."

With this sobering warning made over three decades ago by a leading authority in genetics, we should bethink ourselves not only of presently suspected dangers, as concerned the live virus vaccines, but also those which are possible and plausible for the future.

Perhaps the most subtle and therefore the most dangerous impact of vaccine programs, specifically referring to those involving live viruses, is their potential for affecting the reproductive system. In addition to autoimmune disorders now known or suspected of being vaccine-induced, such as autism, diabetes, and arthritis, reproductive failure may be the ultimate consequence.

If we simply assume a wait-and-see attitude about this possibility, by their very nature, widespread reproductive failures may not become evident until child-bearing years, by which time the process may be very far advanced in the population. Considering that there are sound theoretical reasons for suspecting that the reproductive system may be highly vulnerable to autoimmune disorders, should we not begin appropriate investigations now?

As another basic concept, it *is highly pertinent that many of today's children arc second generation vaccinces; that is, they are born to mothers previously vaccinated with the measles, mumps. and rubella vaccines. It is possible that the reaction rates in the second-generation vaccines may be happening on a much larger scale due to previous scrisitisation of the mothers from their vaccines, this sensitisation in turn being transmitted to the foetus during pregnancy. If this process is taking place, something we cannot know until appropriate research is done, one shudders to think of the unfathomable consequences, should the process be continued into yet another, a third, generation.

Time may prove that vaccine programs went awry when they deviated from the most basic of all medical ethics, the right of a patient to accept or reject a medical therapy, or the right of parents to accept or reject vaccines for their children. Freedom of-choice provides a system of checks and balances now lacking. At the very least, this would provide the parents with power to compel better safety screening of the vaccines. The remedy? Parents should be allowed the right of informed consent, or the right to accept or reject vaccines for their children based on full and uncensored disclosure of pros and cons.

Today we have a system in which vaccine production by the pharmaceutical companies is largely self-regulated. Of course, these companies are interested in profits from their products which, in itself, is not wrong. However, then arbitrary decisions in the mandating of vaccines are made by government bureaucracies, which are highly partisan to the pharmaceuticals, with no recourse open to parents, we have all the potential ingredients for a tragedy of historical proportions.

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