August 23, 2016
If you listen to the mainstream media, you might be under the impression that United States parents are sharply divided between those who believe all children should be vaccinated according the CDC-recommended schedule and those who believe no children should receive any vaccine ever — and that virtually all pediatricians are firmly in the first camp.
The reality, like most realities, is far more nuanced with the majority of parents falling in a category that I’ve been known to call “wishy-washy”: Approximately one-third of all parents of young children in the United States believe that vaccines cause autism, and three-quarters think that parents should have the final say on whether to vaccinate their children or not. Approximately 40% have denied or delayed at least one vaccine for their children, and as of July 2015, uptake for all three doses of the HPV vaccine, which has been on the CDC-recommended schedule for girls 11 and up since 2006, is quite low at 40% for girls and 22% for boys (who were recently added to the recommended list), all while the number of so-called personal belief vaccine exemptions remains at about 1.8%.
Even California, considered the hotbed of vaccine exemptions and which recently passed a law rescinding personal belief exemptions that was triggered by an outbreak of 149 cases of measles originating at Disneyland (despite the fact that the majority of cases were in adults, not unvaccinated children) only had an exemption rate of 2.8% of kindergarteners before the law was passed. And California’s personal belief exemption, unlike those in many other states, didn’t require parents to refrain from all vaccines in order to qualify. That means that parents had exemptions in place if they wanted to avoid so much as a single vaccine on the California schedule (which contains fewer doses of fewer vaccines than the CDC-recommended schedule).
Obviously, though a huge chunk of the parent population is “concerned” about childhood vaccines, the majority do not hold extreme views on vaccines. They just want to do their best to keep their children healthy – and that can be a tall order these days when over 50% of the child population has one or more chronic illnesses, most of which were far rarer a few decades ago. That’s why I was delighted to be provided an advanced copy of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health – from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Years, by Paul Thomas, M.D., and Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D.
I knew from encounters with the authors that both consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” believing that vaccines have been shown to effectively reduce cases of acute infectious disease, but they are also scrupulously conscientious about understanding the real risks vs. benefits, rather than the advertised benefits, and are more than willing to dig up and read the scientific evidence for themselves. I hoped that their book would be a necessary game-changer for the “wishy-washy” majority of parents, supplying them with accurate and empowering information that lowers fear of infectious disease and increases faith in their own judgment, thus providing the bravery to buck an increasingly hostile mainstream medical climate and ultimately resulting in a healthier child population.
Dr. Paul, as Dr. Thomas calls himself throughout the book, is obviously a caring and passionate human being and pediatrician. His parents were missionaries, and he grew up in Zimbabwe, Africa where a close childhood friend died of measles when he was growing up. That’s the sort of experience that understandably makes for zealous doctors, eager to vaccinate their patients against everything under the sun. Fortunately for the world, however, Dr. Paul is not a doctor who is afraid to incorporate new evidence into his worldview. It is clear from the get-go that Dr. Paul is more concerned with the health and well-being of his small patients than adhering to some arbitrarily determined “ideal.” Maybe as the father of 10 children, three of whom were adopted from Africa when their parents died, he understands better than most that one size rarely “fits all.”
The book’s subtitle describes the content of the book rather well. After an excellent and passionate chapter on the overarching problem in most childhood chronic health conditions — toxicity — Dr. Paul and Jennifer (as Margulis is referred to in the book) start with pregnancy and give specific recommendations and strategies for maximizing children’s health in every phase until adulthood. As a passionate children’s health advocate myself, I can attest that they have done a great deal of homework, and I can heartily agree with the vast majority of their suggestions, especially those involving pregnancy and birth practices. It is important to keep toxicity low by eating a whole foods-based organic diet and minimizing interventions wherever possible, including unnecessary ultrasounds (and most are unnecessary), medications in pregnancy and labor, acetaminophen use, and vaccines in pregnancy. I was glad to see Dr. Paul emphasize that, for the most part, vaccines have not been tested in pregnant women, and no studies have been done on the long-term effects on children’s health, while pointing out that they provoke inflammatory responses similar to those that are known to put children at risk of neurodevelopmental problems later in life.
Each chapter contains a number of nuggets of very helpful information for getting through some of the most trying times in the lives of parents and their children. Examples include when to cut a baby’s umbilical cord, how to recognize when a fever is a problem and when it isn’t, what to do about ear infections, how to keep your child safe around water, and how to talk to your teen about sex or depression. My personal favorite is from the “Questions Parents Ask Me Most” section in the toddler chapter. Dr. Paul explains a phenomenon that my daughter experienced when she was three years old, but I have never seen discussed anywhere else, not even by the doctors my daughter saw. It’s called a “pulled elbow” or “nursemaid’s elbow,” and it results from a dislocated radial head. Dr. Paul describes the exact maneuver the pediatric resident used on my daughter in the emergency room and the very same “miraculous” result that we saw.
The most important part of the book from an overall public health standpoint, however, is the treatment of vaccines. Despite Dr. Paul’s history in Zimbabwe, he doesn’t pretend vaccines are the unquestioned uniform good that we are told they are by the mainstream media, the CDC, and their rabid army of “science bloggers” and so-called skeptics, many of whom are paid to promote vaccines. He makes the good point that vaccines have, at least in some cases, greatly reduced the incidence of acute infectious disease. And we have never argued with that. Mortality rates had dropped significantly for virtually every disease for which there is a vaccine before the vaccines were licensed, but the overall rate of disease itself? Not always. For instance, in the United States before the measles vaccine, there were approximately 3-4 million cases of measles a year. We do not even approach that level these days, even if all the babies who sport a fever and a rash and test positive for measles soon after they receive the vaccine are counted. Chances are very, very good that the vaccine has a lot to do with that. Though, as those rabid “science bloggers” love to say, correlation does not equal causation.
Dr. Paul does not question whether or not reducing or eliminating the incidence of infectious disease is in fact the good thing it appears to be. He talks about the possibility that children are “too clean” today, not giving the immune system enough challenges to work as well as it could, but doesn’t bring that point all the way home to the likelihood that successfully battling an acute viral illness or two could be the very best tune-up a sluggish or imbalanced immune system could receive.
But, with that said, Dr. Paul makes it clear that he has heard enough eerily similar stories from parents – who have absolutely no reason to lie to their children’s pediatrician – about horrible reactions to rounds of vaccines and the usual subsequent autism diagnosis to make him seriously question the wisdom of the current shoot-‘em-up, one-size-fits-all vaccine program. In addition, he and Jennifer make a justifiably big deal about the amount of aluminum that a child would receive if she received every dose on the entire CDC-recommended schedule, which is a very, very good thing because injecting all that aluminum into tiny babies is a very, very bad thing.
The authors make a very good case for dumping the hepatitis B vaccine for infants for all but the minuscule number of children born to mothers infected with hepatitis B. (Personally, I think they could take this argument even further, and I hope to take up the topic in a future blog, but it is crystal clear from the discussion that there is no good reason for taking the risk of injecting the average infant with this completely unnecessary vaccine.) The scientific discussion is a little less rigorous for the HPV vaccine (partly because much of the science on adverse events is hidden), but this is one case where it is obvious that Dr. Paul is a pediatrician who can change his mind. He talks about the delicious Merck-funded dinner where he was “educated” about Gardasil and the fabulous benefits it would offer to young girls: No genital warts! And no cervical cancer way down the road! (Maybe . . . that is yet to be determined. Cervical cancer from HPV generally grows very slowly, and is often diagnosed decades after the initial infection which can usually be detected by Pap tests and treated long before it has led to cancer.)
Unfortunately, what the glowing presentation left out were all the adverse events caused by the vaccine, adverse events that have led to devastating conditions for many of the previously healthy young people who have been unlucky enough to receive it. Having watched a number of young people react very badly and listened to others’ reports of similar reactions, he has decided it is simply an unsafe vaccine and no longer recommends it to any of his patients.
The end result of all the vaccine discussion is a stripped down version of the vaccine schedule that he recommends to the families in his practice and which he feels balances the need to protect children from potentially deadly illness and potentially deadly vaccine reactions, but he makes it clear that families in his practice are free to vaccinate as they wish.
Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D.
I would quibble with Dr. Paul on a number of points, among them his eagerness to put strep B-positive pregnant women on antibiotics in labor and the first discussion of obesity. Approximately one-third of American women test positive for strep B bacteria late in pregnancy, which means that those children as well as the children born by C-section are exposed to antibiotics right at the beginning of life when their guts should be receiving a wide variety of beneficial microbes from their mothers. This gut disruption right as life begins sets a child up for a host of negative health effects, including obesity.
When the subject of obesity first comes up, Dr. Paul states baldly that if you are obese it is because of what you eat – and then goes on to explain insulin resistance and its role in making people fat. It is several chapters later before he mentions the fact that studies have shown that obese people (and mice) have an imbalance of gut bacteria that leads their bodies to metabolize food differently, and that they can gain weight if they eat exactly the same thing that thin people do. That means that if you are obese, chances are very good that it’s not because of what you eat: it’s because of a complex interplay between your genes, your gut bacteria, and the food you eat. One way to affect the outcome is to change the food you eat, but that’s not the same thing as your food causing the condition in the first place – a subtle but important difference that helps people set about finding solutions without the fat shaming that is so common – and so destructive – in our culture.
I also don’t like the fact that he mentions that MTHFR mutations and autoimmune conditions make for higher risk when vaccinating, but doesn’t suggest genetic testing for all children whose parents are considering any vaccines before the two-month visit where he recommends two shots. He also doesn’t make it clear that common immune dysregulation conditions, like asthma and allergies, are also red flags indicating that parents should be very careful with vaccines. And the authors neglect to mention the extremely important point that, although Dr. Paul’s vaccine plan is definitely safer than the CDC schedule, in many states it wouldn’t fly. Some vaccines that are considered “required” to attend school (or even day care) are left off his suggested schedule altogether or are suggested at far later times. In some states that’s fine, and a personal belief exemption can be filed for any missing vaccines as suggested by the authors. But in many states, the children would have to get “caught up” before school by receiving any “missed” vaccines or would have to get a religious exemption that would require foregoing any future vaccines, if the exemption could even be obtained in the first place.
That said, I think the overall impact of the book is going to be extremely positive. A helpful appendix at the back of the book includes a numerical analysis of all children under seven who have been Dr. Paul’s clients since birth and makes the compelling point that, among the children who have received zero vaccines and those who have been vaccinated according to Dr. Paul’s recommendations, there are zero cases of autism. Assuming a 1 in 50 autism rate, slightly lower than the 1 in 45 rate for all children reported by a National Health Interview Survey released in 2015, there should be approximately 26 cases between the two groups – if the alterations in vaccine schedule had nothing to do with the development of autism. The third group, vaccinated according to CDC recommendations, had an autism rate of 1 in 60 – very close to the true “background” rate as reported by the 2015 survey.
The bottom line: if you want healthy kids – and who doesn’t? – give at least as much thought to the vaccine schedule as Dr. Paul Thomas does. The easy way to do that is to read his book. As a TMR reader, it may not be perfect for you, but it may just be exactly what it takes to get your next-door neighbor, your pediatrician, or your second cousin to finally understand what it’s going to take to keep kids healthy in today’s world.
~ Professor
For more by Professor, click here.
Full disclosure: I consider one of the authors, Jennifer Margulis, a good friend and am mentioned in the acknowledgments section at the back of the book (just after Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) as a medical freedom fighter and friend.
Cutting and pasting my comment regarding this book from the Age of Autism blog:
• a slower, evidence-based vaccine schedule that calls for only one aluminum-containing shot at a time
Wow, from what I understand, there is NO safe amount of aluminum to ever inject into a human being, much less one whose immune and nervous systems, brain, and GI tract are developing.
And “evidence-based” vaccine schedule? The only verifiable evidence I know about is the evidence showing how damaging, sometimes-fatal, vaccines are…and that their failure rate is off the charts.
Here is Dr. Thomas’ 1-min. promo for his new book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igr2yd8T0wM
Clearly, he has more critically-important information to learn, or he wouldn’t still be injecting the dangerous, disgusting, immoral and repugnant, always-damaging ingredients in vaccines (not to mention the ones we don’t know about because not all ingredients are required to be listed and disclosed, some are hidden under “trade secrets”) into his patients…ingredients that have no business inside the human body…especially having missed being filtered out and hopefully cleared via the respiratory and digestive tracts. Directly injecting vaccine ingredients into the muscle tissue and vascular system is dangerous, destructive, and pure insanity.
Here is the link to Dr. Thomas’ testimony in OR last year, and my reply to the person who sent the link to me:
https://youtu.be/aNQVdOx87Ak
Just because a disease is frightening or potentially fatal does not make the vaccine “for it” safe, effective, or needed. Never are our internal systems to be violated, tainted, and intoxicated in the ways that vaccinations violate, taint, toxify, and permanently alter, for the worse, for life. Never.
Of all people whose systems should not be further compromised via vaccination, it would be people in “3rd world” countries whose nutritional status and health status might very well already be compromised. Talk about a death sentence for these children, and adding insult to injury. What those children need, like children everywhere, is clean drinking water, nutritious food (and not the GMO-pesticide-chemical-laden “food” sent by U.S. “aide” missions, which again, adds insult to injury), and proper hygiene and sanitation in the areas in which they live. They do not need the poisonous and permanently health-damaging ingredients in vaccines injected into their closed systems, where they will remain, wreaking havoc over the course of these children’s lifetimes, permanently ruining their immune systems.
In his testimony, he discloses that he still gives the DTaP and MMR vaccines to all his patients, “so they are not putting the immunocompromised at risk.” Yet again he shows that he has not read all of the available literature. Both of these vaccines have inexcusably high failure rates, with ever-increasing “boosters” recommended, are incredibly risky, and are potentially fatal. The MMR is a live-virus vaccine, so its recipients are shedding and spreading the diseases for which they were vaccinated. We know recipients of DTaP can be harboring pertussis in their throats and spreading it, unknowingly…not to mention the vaccine has caused more virulent strains of pertussis to become more prevalent, to which the vaccinated have been proven to be even more susceptible. He ends with, “Herd immunity is there,” referring to his cohort of selectively-vaccinated patients. There is no proof of that, and in actuality, there is proof of the exact opposite, as I have just written.
On top of that, it is no child’s responsibility to protect another child. It is the parent’s job to protect their child. How dare he or anyone else put that onus on a child, and a false and dangerous, potentially-fatal one at that…and how dare he or anyone else value one child’s life above another’s. Has he read Dr. Tetyana Obukhanych’s testimony in CA which completely refutes the falsehood that vaccines prevent the spread of disease? He should.
Here is a question for him: How is it possible that my taking a medicine will make your medicine more effective? If vaccines work, the vaccinated should not have any worries, they should feel oh so protected. And if the immunocompromised “can’t have” a vaccine (which is hardly ever the case, by the way, according to CDC guidelines), their parents would be better served to ask why their kids are immunocompromised in the first place…most likely, it is from the vaccines they allowed their children to be given. If being out in the community poses a risk for them, then their parents must keep them at home until they feel it is safe for their child to reenter places out in the community.
While it is good that he supports informed consent, it appears that he is unaware that true informed consent cannot even happen with vaccines due to all of the lies, fraud, and deception that underlies them, from manufacture to mandate, and beyond, and that the proper studies have never been done. He actually admits that he is aware of both in his testimony, mentioning the fraud committed on the CDC’s MMR-Autism study, and saying, “The process is unfolding. We need the studies.” Yet, he continues to vaccinate the babies and children in his practice? That is unacceptable. They are not guinea pigs, and should not be used as unwitting experimental test subjects with medical procedures that carry the serious risks of chronic illness, permanent disability, premature death, and immediate death. The only facts that can be reliably relayed at this point in time are that vaccines are dangerous, they cause grave harm, chronic illness, and permanent disability, they spread disease, they fail, they taint and derail the immune system forever, and they kill.
Vaccine injury is real. It isn’t rare. The only way to stop the Vaccine Holocaust is to stop the vaccinating. Instead of endless propaganda campaigns to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate, we need education campaigns regarding the tried and true, risk-free ways, to protect, maintain, and enhance health. We already have that knowledge, and we need to be spreading it widely now.
This book sounds like a solid bridge to present new medical information to people who would never consider NOT vaccinating. It facilitates a paradigm shift in manageable intellectual processing steps.
It took a century for government and industry to build a worldwide vaccine distribution network. That juggernaut is not going to magically collapse overnight. However forced vaccination mandates could easily backfire by pushing consumers too far. This is the kind of next-steps book that pro-vaccine parents will seek first.
As a previous nurse educator who taught microbiology and the immune system I believe in vaccines but now as a person with Electrohypersensitivity or EHS I have discovered that there definitely is a problem with giving vaccines which contain heavy metals such as mercury as once an EHS sufferer our blood-brain barrier is broken and the mercury can go straight to the brain and cause damage so I do not have the flu vaccine now etc. I think the issue is the abundance and increasing amount of electricity, mobile phones, wifi etc. with which we are now bathing our children’s environment and ignoring the dangers and perhaps leading to an intolerance of vaccines we need to have. I would also prefer teaching children about safe sex rather than having to give them a vaccine for HPV but maybe that is a pipe dream!
Very good review, thank you for putting it together. It’s particularly heartening to hear that his practice has zero cases of autism.
However, it does look like — unique though he is as pediatrician — he hasn’t explained what the very latest science is telling us regarding autism and autoimmunity. Nor is he mentioning what the very old science is telling us regarding allergies.
Starting with autism, we now can create autistic mice (Caltech, 2009) and autistic monkeys (Caltech/UCDavis, 2014) by purposefully elevating interleukin-6 by artificial means. This is a big deal because immune activation is the purpose of vaccination. Without IA, the antigen would not be recognized and antibodies would not be formed.
But it is during IA that the brain will excrete the (generally) pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6. In some unfortunate children, a single activation will excrete a large amount of IL-6, the child’s brain will inflame and autism will ensue.
For other children, it takes repeated IA to cause the glial cells to remain stuck on and continually excrete IL-6, thus causing chronic brain inflammation and autism will ensue for them, too.
When the brain excretes IL-1beta at the same time as IL-6, epilepsy is the result.
Epilepsy is a common co-morbidity to autism.
IA can also cause gut dysbiosis and that’s been demonstrated to cause autistic behavior in mice, too.
Much of this can be learned at http://vaccinepapers.org/part-1-immune-activation-autism
How many times is a child’s immune system activated by age 18? I counted six times before age two with the CDC schedule. And how strong is the activation when five, seven or even nine vaccines are given simultaneously? Although there is a study that shows that autism is more commonly reported in VAERS for multiple simultaneous vaccinations, parents report that a single vaccination (that is, a single immune activation) damaged their child.
With respect to autoimmunity, Shoenfeld, a leading researcher in autoimmunity and author or editor of over 25 medical textbooks, has introduced the concept of ASIA “Autoimmune/Auto-inflammatory Syndrome induced by Adjuvants” (http://lup.sagepub.com/content/21/2/118.full). Though he handles the bigger picture, it is Kanduc at the University of Bologna who points out that in her 20 years of research, her group has been unable to find a pathogen with a peptide sequence completely unique to it. They have always found it in the human sequences. This makes sense given the co-evolution of the viruses in the human virome.
Given these common peptide sequences, evolution thus had to create in us immunotolerant mechanisms so that the human immune system would not constantly be attacking self. Just because it sees a peptide sequence that is also in a pathogen doesn’t mean it is actually a pathogen. It might be the body itself.
When an adjuvant is used to activate the immune system, it is in this heightened state that the immunotolerant mechanisms are overwhelmed and the body is incorrectly programmed to attack itself. This has lead to the over 80 autoimmune diseases we now recognize.
There is no way to avoid the risk of creating an autoimmune reaction when we activate the immune system and this is especially true with the strong activation that occurs with the use of toxic aluminum salts in vaccines.
As for allergies, Von Pirquet coined the term “allergy” because he needed a word that handled the clinical reactions to vaccination thereby reserving “immunity” for those responses that did not produce a clinical reaction (“Von Pirquet, allergy and infectious diseases: a review,” Turk, 1987).
The fundamental principle that was understood over 100 years ago is that it is not possible to activate the immune system without also producing an allergic response or otherwise sensitize the organism. The two must arise together. If there are peanut proteins in the vaccine then the allergy will be to (at least) the peanut but the organism is now sensitized and open to future allergies from wherever the foreign proteins come — like leaky gut (food proteins) or leaky lung (pollen, etc.).
Finally, because I mentioned aluminum salts, does he mention that we now know the aluminum nanoparticles are engulfed by macrophages and moved around the body via the lymphatic system? In animal models they have been found in many soft tissues including the brain. These nanoparticles are a neurological time bomb we are inserting in every child. (Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum adjuvants of vaccines, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fneur.2015.00004/full)
We should not be inserting aluminum nanoparticles into our children.
Though I honor his and Jennifer’s commitment to find a middle way, the title of their book is simple incorrect: there is no “safe” vaccine plan. Dr. Thomas might have found no instances of autism in his practice but has he checked for life threatening allergies and dibilitating autoimmune diseases?
To get improve the health of the United States and dramatically reduce the 4.25 billion prescriptions written in 2015, we must entirely rethink the vaccine paradigm.
A completely neurologically and immunologically intact infant is one whose brain and immune system have not been altered by vaccines.
Excellent coverage of points that were missed, Andre! I didn’t want the review to be too long, and we will be hosting several reposts of vaccinepapers in the very near future because the author has put it altogether so well so I didn’t go into those points here.
André, very well said.
I don’t believe that Dr Thomas’ practice will be autism-free with his vaccine policies. They may reduce the risk, but it will still happen.
And as you point out, autism is just one of the most extreme injuries, other forms of brain/immune damage will still have much higher prevalence with Dr Thomas’ policy.
I’m in favor of encouraging parents to research vaccines, and helping them to understand the real risks of vaccinating their children.
But my evaluation is that the risks for all vaccines far outweigh the benefits, and that vaccines should be banned as too dangerous for everyone.
The major problem with that position, Tim, is that way too many people believe that they are necessary for survival of the species. If you say “We are going to ban all your favorite lifesaving drugs, you would have a mutiny on your hands. However, if you have a person who still believes they are necessary in some situations, but understands and can explain the science for why you should avoid particularly dangerous ones, and particularly dangerous times, and particularly dangerous combinations, many more people will be reached and many fewer children will be harmed in the near term.
Tim, thats a slippery slope even for someone like myself who has never participated in the vaccination program. Shall we go to banning soda, nicotine, alcohol, etc as those can be equally dangerous? If ones lifestyle does not change to insure good health, then drugs are certainly their only chance of survival. Of course this is kicking the can down the road, as eventually, with any med and vaccines there is failure and deadly side effects. But its their can to kick.
Nicely said.
I agree it is difficult for people to believe that the risks from all existing vaccines outweigh the benefits, that they’ve been lied to by the CDC and the medical business, and that any vaccine can cause catastrophic injury.
I do in fact recommend books like this to people who say they are firmly pro-vaccine; in the past I’ve recommended Vaccines 2.0. I do think that reduced/delayed vaccine programs are safer, and will reduce the injury rates — but needless injuries will still occur.
So I view this as a step towards the optimal plan (e.g. no vaccines), not as the last word.
If the authors read vaccinepapers.org, and understood the science, they would never recommend vaccines containing aluminum adjuvant. If they understood the infant immune system is supposed to be calm, they wouldn’t recommend any vaccines before the age of 2. I hope that the comments they are getting on the book will help educate them. I’ve ordered a copy and will read it before reviewing on amazon and barns-and-noble.