Childhood Allergy Epidemic: Are the Increasing Number of Vaccines Injected into Children to Blame?

The global prevalence of allergic diseases is skyrocketing, affecting 30% to 40% of the world’s population. Allergic conditions include food allergies, anaphylaxis, asthma, eczema, allergic rhinitis, allergic conjunctivitis and reactions to drugs and insects. In the U.S., food allergies are widespread and are the most common cause of anaphylaxis in children. One in 13 American children—about two per classroom—has at least one food allergy, and food allergies increased by 50% from 1997 to 2011. Given that the hallmark of allergic disease is an altered immune response, it stands to reason that vaccines— which purposefully set out to “reprogram immunity”—are major contenders as allergy triggers. To grasp how the chain of vaccine-related events initiated roughly 30 years ago has bred today’s worldwide allergy epidemics, one has to understand that vaccines, by their very nature, induce an unnatural immune response. This property of vaccines is called “immunogenicity.”