Why is the CDC and FDA Still Recommending the Failed Whooping Cough Vaccine?

Health Impact News

2013 was the year the CDC and FDA finally admitted there were problems with the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine.

When cases of whooping cough spiked in 2012, the media and medical community was quick to rush in and blame unvaccinated children. The data, however, could not support that claim.

In 2013, there were two major research papers published documenting the failure of the pertussis vaccine. I don’t believe the first one, published in early 2013, received any mainstream media exposure at all, while the second one, later in the year, was back-page news. However, both of these studies should have been headline stories.

The first study reported in early 2013 that researchers had found the first U.S. evidence of vaccine-resistant pertussis. The same phenomenon had been observed in other countries, and research showing that pertussis was developing immunity against the current pertussis vaccine being given to children should have made headline news. But of course, it did not.

Lisa Schnirring from the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy at the University of Minnesota summarized the research:

Researchers in other countries have found evidence that circulating strains of Bordetella pertussis have adapted to the acellular vaccine, and researchers today reported similar findings for the first time in US kids, based on genetic analysis of isolates from hospitalized children.

Infectious disease experts have been eyeing waning immunity from acellular pertussis vaccines as a contributor to increasing numbers of cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in several countries, and evidence is mounting that another factor fueling the outbreaks could be that the bacteria are adapting to the vaccine.

The US researchers, including a scientist from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), described their findings in a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Full story here.)

Note that one of the scientists in this study was from the CDC.

Then, later in 2013, the FDA published a study they had conducted on the pertussis vaccine, admitting that cases of whopping cough were increasing among a highly vaccinated public. They studied the effect of the vaccine on baboons, and found out that vaccinated baboons still carried around whooping cough in their throats, spreading it to others. The N.Y. Times actually reported on this in their “Health Section”.

So both the CDC and the FDA were aware in 2013 that the whooping cough vaccine was not effective, and yet it is still part of the vaccine schedule. Why?

Could it be because the vaccine is part of a combo vaccine, along with diphtheria and tetanus, and that it therefore represents too great of a financial loss for the drug manufacturers to stop using it?

A recent report from Europe revealed that new whooping cough vaccines are in development, as the World Health Organization has also admitted that the pertussis vaccine no longer works. In the U.S., however, unvaccinated children are still being blamed in the mainstream media for the increase in whooping cough cases. (Just do an internet search for “whooping cough unvaccinated” to see this currently happening.)

Since the U.S. Congress has given vaccine manufacturers total legal immunity from being sued for faulty vaccines or injuries and deaths caused by them, a law upheld by the Supreme Court in 2011, there is no legal basis to stop the ineffective whooping cough vaccine from being injected into children. To stop it would cost billions of dollars in vaccine revenues for the next couple of years as they try to develop a new vaccine to replace the current ineffective pertussis vaccine.

And if one is tempted to think that those who manufacture these vaccines would never keep a defective product on the market knowingly, think again. Twenty percent of all white collar corporate crime is now committed in the pharmaceutical industry, with every major vaccine manufacturer now a convicted criminal. A recent editorial written in the British Medical Journal chronicled how the fines levied against this criminal activity is not sufficient enough to prohibit the companies from continuing to act like criminals. (See: BMJ: Escalating Criminal Behavior by Pharmaceutical Companies due to Insufficient Penalties)

As for the government stepping in to protect the public from a failed vaccine? The story of how Julie Gerberding, the head of the CDC from 2002 through 2009, left government to become the president of Merck’s Vaccine division, a $5 billion dollar a year operation, and the supplier of the largest number of vaccines the CDC recommends, pretty much says it all.

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