The other triple vaccine

Last autumn, while we were all busy worrying about whether baby Leo got his MMR jab, the British government sneaked another vaccine into the preschooler booster schedule. Not just any old vaccine, but the most dangerous one of all.

It represented a move of desperation. The British public health machinery has got wind of the fact that whooping cough is epidemic in certain highly vaccinated countries and, even though our numbers are still fairly small, a disproportionate number of very tiny babies – the very members of the population we are trying to protect through vaccination – are the ones who are mainly catching it.

The idea was to attempt to nip this epidemic in the bud by rushing through a booster in the hope that older children would stop passing this highly contagious disease on to their younger siblings.

The problem is that the young ones may not be catching the same disease that the vaccine is meant to protect us against.

Copious evidence shows that the bacteria that cause whooping cough has mutated as a response to vaccination. And this new disease is not responding to the jab. This is why whooping cough is reemerging everywhere in the West.

The government is throwing the only arsenal it has at the problem – a new, supposedly safer vaccine – even though it may have little hope of working on the new, mutated form of the disease.

It’s bad enough that many children may be subjected to the considerable side-effects of the new whooping cough jab for no good reason at all. But even worse is how little medicine has investigated the safety of this or, indeed, any whooping cough jab.

I (who am fairly shockproof when it comes to the limitations of modern medicine) was utterly stunned to discover how little true safety testing the whooping cough vaccine has undergone. Believe it or not, there have been no safety tests since the 1950s and, even at that time, there was only a handful.

The public health authorities here and in the US have relied on a British study carried out in the 1970s. There have been countless anecdotal reports of seizures, encephalitis, brain damage and death, and yet this has never been properly investigated by anybody anywhere. It’s as though no one wants to have their worst fears confirmed.

So instead, they have substituted the purified, acellular, new improved version of the jab. It looks like it’s safer – it certainly causes fewer reactions – but most studies are short-term and the only reactions studied were the immediate ones. In Britain, its safety was simply assumed from the American experience.

It’s like the issue of multiple vaccines and the MMR. No one believes it is worth truly examining whether there is some sort of upper limit to the number of antigens you can pump into a tiny child before all kinds of subtle brain damage come into play. Governments and health authorities have operated for so long on the assumption that it is safe to do so that to question otherwise would amount to the grossest kind of heresy.

The British government believes that the only way forward on the issue of vaccine safety is to dig in its heels firmly. If it remains recalcitrant for long enough, all of this bad press will go away. And with the docile press in this country, to a large extent, it can.

The press gave the British government a hard time for a week. The government gave a press conference, and the story came off the front pages.

But not off ours. A number of you asked where we were during the MMR debate. I was here, in front of my computer, assembling every last shred of evidence about the MMR. Our 24-page report, What the Government Doesn’t Tell You About the MMR Jab, is ready and available for you and any of your friends who need it (see enclosed flyer). I was where I should be, fighting against the government with the most powerful weapon I have: the written word.