Little-known Facts about Poliomyelitis Vaccinations

www.nexusmagazine.com NEXUS • 37 P ro-vaccinators claim eradication success with vaccines against two diseases: smallpox and poliomyelitis. The problem is that both these claims are not true, but many people believe them. In this article, I deal with outbreaks of paralytic poliomyelitis straight after mass vaccination programs in both developed and developing countries, as published in orthodox medical journals. When the first, injectable, Salk polio vaccine was tested on some 1.8 million children in the USA in 1954–55, cases of paralysis in the vaccinated and some of their contacts started occurring within days (Francis et al., 1955; Peterson et al., 1955). It became known as the Cutter Incident. Cutter Laboratories was accused of distributing vaccines which contained live polioviruses. Even though paralysis also occurred after injections of other polio vaccines produced by different manufacturers, Cutter Laboratories became the scapegoat and was asked to withdraw all batches of its vaccines. The disasters with the injectable polio vaccines causing paralysis seem to have been one of the main motivations behind developing an oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV), which was believed to simulate the natural infection. The reality proved such expectations wrong. Henderson et al. (1964) wrote that since 1961, when oral poliomyelitis vaccines were first made available for general use in the USA, scattered cases of paralytic disease have occurred in association with these vaccines. Many of these cases have been clinically indistinguishable from paralytic poliomyelitis. Epidemiologically, the pattern of their occurrence has raised the possibility that some cases may have been caused by the vaccines. In 1962, when the existence of this problem was first appreciated, the Surgeon General of the US Public Health Service convened a Special Advisory Committee which met on a number of occasions between August and December. The committee reviewed in detail the reported cases of paralytic disease occurring within a period of 30 days following ingestion of the oral polio vaccine. Of these, 11 followed "type III vaccine" and seven followed "type I vaccine". The committee concluded that "the maximum potential risk for types I and III vaccine is in the order of one per million or less overall; but higher for those over 30 years of age". Now we know how the much-quoted rate of these vaccine-caused cases as "one per million or less overall" was born: it was created as a typical desktop statistic by a committee and not achieved by a proper statistical study. (A proverbial camel: a horse created by a committee. Sorry, camels; only joking!) Importantly, poliovirus type III was the one most implicated. The committee also made this allegation: "The total number of such reports [meaning paralysis after the administration of OPV] received by the Public Health Service through June 1964, is 123. This number includes those cases reviewed by the Committee in 1962. Of this total, 36 cases occurred in LITTLE-KNOWN FACTS ABOUT POLIOMYELITIS VACCINATIONS