The Awful Pertussis Vaccine

The New York Times reports on a new study finding that the greatest risk to infants of being infected with the bacteria that causes whooping cough, or pertussis, now comes from their older siblings. The Times explains that this is “probably a result of waning immunity among children and adolescents who had received the DTaP vaccine.”

Indeed, waning immunity is a serious problem with the DTaP combination vaccine (which contains diptheria, tetanus, and pertussis antigens). One recent study published in Pediatrics concluded, “Tdap protection wanes within 2 to 4 years. Lack of long-term protection after vaccination is likely contributing to increases in pertussis among adolescents.”

But the Times is misleading its readers by telling only one part of the story, leaving readers with the impression that simply giving more “booster” shots would solve the problem.A subsequent study in Clinical Infectious Diseases looked at data from eight states and found that, overall, 85% of pertussis isolates were PRN-deficient, with a range from 67% in Colorado to 100% in New Mexico.

Moreover, vaccinated individuals were found to have “a significantly higher odds” of having PRN-deficient B. pertussis than unvaccinated individuals.

And by “significantly”, they meant that vaccinated individuals were more than twice as likely to be infected as the unvaccinated. In fact, they found that fully vaccinated case patients had “a 2- to 4-fold greater odds” of having PRN-deficient B. pertussis than the unvaccinated.

Without explicitly pinpointing public vaccine policy as the catalyst, they note the appearance of “a selective advantage to lacking the protein” for the bacteria.

Indeed.

Of course, one would think that such findings might call into question public vaccine policy. But an institutional myopia exists such that questioning public policy is out of the question. The FDA study finding that pertussis vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease, for example, concluded that the solution was “the development of improved vaccines”.

The simple notion that the human body was designed naturally to have an immune system capable of fending off infectious diseases and that we ought to focus therefore on ways to build up natural immunity, such as through proper nutrition, is practically anathema to the theory underlying public vaccine policy (not to mention the mega-profits for the pharmaceutical companies who have been granted legal immunity by the federal government from damages caused by their vaccine products).

At the very least, parents ought to be properly informed by the media, public health officials, and their pediatricians. But getting even that modicum of sensibility to be widely practiced will no doubt certainly be a long, arduous road for advocates of informed consent.