by ScienceDaily
Excerpts:
Whooping cough has made an astonishing comeback, with 2012 seeing nearly 50,000 infections in the U.S. (the most since 1955), and a death rate in infants three times that of the rest of the population. The dramatic resurgence has puzzled public health officials, who have pointed to the waning effectiveness of the current vaccine and growing anti-vaccine sentiment as the most likely culprits.
But that might not be the whole story, suggests a new study published in BMC Medicine by Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellows Ben Althouse and Sam Scarpino. Their research points to a different, but related, source of the outbreak — vaccinated people who are infectious but who do not display the symptoms of whooping cough, suggesting that the number of people transmitting without symptoms may be many times greater than those transmitting with symptoms.
Althouse and Scarpino used whopping cough case counts from the CDC, genomic data on the pertussis bacteria, and a detailed epidemiological model of whooping cough transmission to conclude that acellular vaccines may well have contributed to — even exacerbated — the recent pertussis outbreak by allowing infected individuals without symptoms to unknowingly spread pertussis multiple times in their lifetimes.
“There could be millions of people out there with just a minor cough or no cough spreading this potentially fatal disease without knowing it,” said Althouse. “The public health community should act now to better assess the true burden of pertussis infection.”
Read the full article here.
Health Impact News Editor Comments
Will public health officials heed Dr. Althouse’s advice and take steps to protect the public from outbreaks of whooping cough that are growing now due to the failure of the vaccine? Dr. Althouse, by the way, is not an anti-vaccine “quack.” He has a PhD in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University.
Sadly, the mainstream media, pharmaceutical industry, and politicians are more concerned about passing laws to mandate these vaccines than they are on improving the vaccines and keeping the public safe. The pertussis vaccine, which is acknowledged to be a total failure in the scientific community, is still part of the required childhood vaccine schedule. The main reason it is still given to America’s children is because it is part of a combination vaccine, either DTaP or Tdap. To view recent court decisions awarding compensation due to injuries caused by these two whooping cough childhood vaccines, see the latest Department of Justice reports from the Vaccine Court here.
Sadly, it is unlikely that public health officials will follow Dr. Althouse’s advice, as the mainstream media continues to blame unvaccinated children for whooping cough outbreaks. A solution to the problem of vaccinated children spreading whooping cough will never be achieved while the true problem is ignored, and instead more laws are proposed to force these vaccines on America’s children.
Comment on this article at VaccineImpact.com.
Reference
Benjamin M. Althouse, Samuel V. Scarpino. Asymptomatic transmission and the resurgence of Bordetella pertussis. BMC Medicine, 2015; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s12916-015-0382-8
More on the failed pertussis vaccine.
Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced?
One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.”
However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines.
The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary.
Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field.
In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual.
Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot.
These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions.
In this article, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe.