|
| |
 | "There were 872 serious adverse events reported to VAERS in children under 14 years
of age who had been injected with hepatitis B vaccine" |
| at most, 10 percent of doctors report adverse reactions to VAERS. |
| By contrast, in 1996 only 279 cases of hepatitis B disease were reported in children
under age 14." |
| |
If 10% of the adverse events are reported, then there are at least 8,720 adverse
reactions to the vaccine, which is 31 times as many as the total number of cases of
Hepatitis B.
This makes the vaccine at least 31 times more dangerous than the disease.
The
Danger of Hepatitis B
Vaccine
by
Kevin B. O'Reilly
Kristin
Jennings was explaining what
happened
to her 3?-year-old son, Dylan. She
recounted
how he was a "completely healthy"
two-week-old
baby before he received his
hepatitis
B vaccination, at the
recommendation
of his pediatrician.
She
told of his extreme agitation and high
fever
the night of the vaccination, and how
he
stopped breathing in the doctor's office
the
next day. He was feverish for three days
and
projectile vomited on the fourth. On the
fifth
day, all the tests came back negative
and
Dylan was to be released. That's when he
started
having seizures, and drifting in and
out
of consciousness.
Jennings
relayed how a CAT scan revealed
tremendous
swelling of Dylan's brain. Three
months
later, she and her husband, Jeb
Jennings,
learned that Dylan had suffered 40
percent
brain damage as a result of
meningo-encephalitis
(swelling of the brain)
-
almost the entire left side of his brain.
Even
under the best of circumstances Dylan
would
have a severe learning disability and
mild
cerebral palsy, doctors told the
Jennings.
Under the worst case scenario, he
would
be mentally retarded and confined to a
wheelchair.
That's
when Dylan could be heard crying and
yelping
in the background, having just
awakened
from a nap. His mother asked him
whether
he wanted to say, "Hi." A sweet
little
boy's voice spat out the word. "Hi,"
Dylan
said.
"Do
you want to say, 'Bye'?" his mother
asked.
In the same fashion, he spat out a
heartily
brief, "Bye."
"That's
about half his vocabulary," Jennings
said.
Though
it has cost the Jennings, who live in
Vail,
Colo., more than $50,000 for
occupational,
physical, and alternative
therapies
in the last three years to ensure
that
Dylan could walk on his own and "be the
best
person he could be," he was fortunate,
at
least, to survive.
Not
An Isolated Story
Lyla
Rose Belkin of Manhattan, N.Y., was not
so
lucky. She died on Sept. 16, 1998 at the
age
of five weeks, about 15 hours after
receiving
her second hepatitis B vaccine
shot.
That night, her father Michael Belkin
said,
Lyla "was extremely agitated, noisy,
and
feisty, and then she fell asleep
suddenly
and stopped breathing."
The
New York City medical examiner ruled the
death
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS),
because
there wasn't evidence to indicate
any
other cause of death. The coroner's
notes
said, "brain is swollen" - just like
Dylan's
was.
These
are just two of the many stories of
parents
whose children, usually infants,
have
suffered severe reactions shortly after
being
given the hepatitis B vaccine, which
was
licensed by the FDA in 1982. As of 1999,
about
36,000 reports had been filed with the
Centers
for Disease Control's Vaccine
Adverse
Event Reporting System (VAERS) since
1991,
when the hepatitis B vaccine was
recommended
for all infants by a CDC
advisory
panel.
Hepatitis
B is a serious disease caused by a
virus
that attacks the liver. The virus can
cause
lifelong infection, cirrhosis of the
liver,
liver cancer, liver failure, and
death.
It
is present in the blood and bodily fluids
of
an infected individual and can be
transmitted
through sexual activity,
intravenous
drug use, and perinatally - that
is,
from an infected mother to her child
during
birth.
"It's
not like a flu virus, where you get
the
virus and you get over it and it goes
away,"
explained Dr. Pamela Diaz, medical
director
for acute disease surveillance at
the
Chicago Department of Health. "With
hepatitis
B, there are two possibilities:
you
can get over it and it goes away, or it
can
stay with you as a chronic infection for
the
rest of your life."
The
CDC estimates that there are as many as
1.25
million Americans chronically infected
with
hepatitis B. Every year, the CDC says,
between
140,000 and 320,000 people in the
United
States become infected with hepatitis
B,
but only half of those infections are
symptomatic.
Every year, between 140 and 320
Americans
die of the disease, according to
the
CDC.
The
CDC says that hepatitis B rates were
down
55 percent through 1993, though they
are
going up among three groups: "sexually
active
heterosexuals, homosexual men, and
injection
drug users." Forty-one states have
added
hepatitis B to their list of
vaccinations
required for children entering
elementary
school.
Neurological
Damage from Vaccination
Many
of the parents who have reported
adverse
events to VAERS believe that the
hepatitis
B vaccine injured their children,
though
researchers at the Atlanta, Ga.-based
CDC
say that there is no scientific evidence
of
any serious reactions to the vaccine.
"The
most common side effect is a mild
redness
at the injection site, and an
occasional
mild fever," said Diaz of the
Chicago
Health Department.
Dr.
Jane M. Orient, executive director of
the
Arizona-based Association of American
Physicians
and Surgeons (AAPS), and an
opponent
of the mandatory hepatitis B
vaccine,
disagrees.
"It's
much more common for the baby to
scream
for days on end inconsolably," she
said,
"which is probably evidence for some
neurological
damage that's going on, which
may
or may not be permanent."
Diaz
noted that in order for the hepatitis B
vaccine
to be licensed by the Food and Drug
Administration
(FDA), it had to go through a
"very,
very rigorous" testing process. The
approval
process usually takes 10 to 12
years,
Diaz said, and includes randomized,
double-blind
clinical trials using placebos.
"The
hepatitis B vaccine was tested on
adults
and in infants, because of the high
rate
of carriage in China and Southeast
Asia,"
Diaz said, "where there were problems
with
perinatal transmission, and a huge
problem
with liver cancer, etc. Initially, a
lot
of the vaccine trials were done in that
part
of the world."
It
is precisely where the trials were
originally
conducted that troubles Orient.
"All
the really bad long-term chronic
crippling
conditions [caused by the
hepatitis
B vaccine] have occurred in
Caucasians,"
Orient said.
"But
the safety studies pre-licensure for
infants
were done on Asians, like Taiwanese
or
Alaskan Indians or Eskimos, who have a
much
higher risk for the disease and may
also
not have the genetic factors that
predispose
a bad reaction to the vaccine."
Jennings
said she almost immediately
suspected
that Dylan was injured by the
hepatitis
B vaccine, and mentioned it to her
doctors.
She says they dismissed her
concerns,
saying that the hepatitis B
vaccine
couldn't have caused Dylan's
problems.
"They
made me feel like I was a bad mother,
that
I exposed the baby to some unknown
virus,"
Jennings said. "I took him out to
the
supermarket when he was two weeks of age
and
he caught something there. You know
that's
the way that I think they make you
feel.
They don't mean to, but the burden's
placed
on you that your baby got sick." Not
one
of the doctors who treated Dylan during
his
first stay in the hospital, when he was
having
seizures and his brain had swollen,
reported
the matter to VAERS, Jennings said.
No
Report, No Data
This
is in spite of the fact that VAERS
"encourages
reporting of any clinically
significant
adverse event that occurs after
the
administration of any vaccine licensed
in
the United States, even if it is not
certain
that the vaccine caused the event."
This
is one of the many controversies
surrounding
VAERS. Parents and advocates for
limiting
the hepatitis B vaccine's use among
infants
and children say that, at most, 10
percent
of doctors report adverse reactions
to
VAERS.
In
spite of VAERS being "underreported," in
their
opinion, these same advocates have
attempted
to use VAERS data to show that for
children
under 14 the risk of an adverse
reaction
to the hepatitis B vaccine is
higher
than the risk of acquiring the
disease
itself.
"There
were 872 serious adverse events
reported
to VAERS in children under 14 years
of
age who had been injected with hepatitis
B
vaccine," said Barbara Loe Fisher,
co-founder
and president of the National
Vaccine
Information Center (NVIC), a vaccine
safety
advocacy organization.
"The
children were either taken to a
hospital
emergency room, had life
threatening
health problems, were
hospitalized
or were left disabled following
vaccination.
Forty-eight children were
reported
to have died after they were
injected
with hepatitis B vaccine in 1996.
By
contrast, in 1996 only 279 cases of
hepatitis
B disease were reported in
children
under age 14."
Diaz
says that VAERS data cannot be used to
reach
such a conclusion. "VAERS is an
adverse
events reporting system, so any
adverse
event that occurs after vaccination,
no
matter how long after vaccination, can be
included.
"And
so," Diaz continued, "albeit that VAERS
collects
a lot of information about adverse
events
and vaccine history, it's not
designed
to associate causality."
Dr.
Deborah Wexler explained it differently.
"Many
times in looking for answers [about
why
children become ill], we do tend to draw
associations
to something that happened very
recently,"
said Wexler, executive director
of
the St. Paul, Minn.-based Immunization
Action
Coalition, which works to boost
immunization
rates.
"In
terms of children," Wexler continued,
"it
would not be uncommon to be able to find
within
a certain time frame a point at which
a
vaccine was given. That doesn't make it a
cause."
So,
if VAERS is not designed to associate
causality
and is statistically questionable,
what
is its purpose? "There might be very,
very
rare events that wouldn't get picked up
in
clinical trials that might be detected
with
VAERS," Diaz explained.
"It
should be looked at in the sense that,
'We've
had these reports, could there
possibly
be an association, let's go look
and
find out and do a study do determine
that.'
It's a way of generating hypotheses
post-licensure."
Sexually
Active, Heroin-Injecting Babies
So,
don't the thousands of adverse events
reports
so far justify a new round of safety
studies
on the hepatitis B vaccine? "Most
definitely,"
Diaz said, "we always need to
continue
to monitor safety." What especially
angered
Michael Belkin and his wife, Lorna,
was
when they discovered that hepatitis B
was
most prevalent among high- risk
populations
of adults such as the sexually
adventurous,
intravenous drug users, and
medical
workers.
"Why
in the world is this being given to
babies?"
Belkin asked himself.
The
reason, says Diaz, is that while most
adults
do not become chronic carriers of the
disease,
"if you acquire it as an infant,
unfortunately
the scales are tipped toward
the
baby being a chronic carrier.
"Ninety
percent of babies become chronic
carriers,"
said Diaz. "Many who have the
virus
chronically are asymptomatic. A number
of
individuals will, however, go on to
chronic
hepatitis B symptoms mostly
associated
with liver damage, like cirrhosis
and
liver cancer."
Wexler
added that "children who acquire
hepatitis
B have a 25 percent chance of
dying
of liver disease as adults."
Jane
Orient of AAPS finds this logic
questionable.
"They say that the risk of the
disease
is worse than the risk of the
vaccine.
Well," she said, "if you get
hepatitis
B the chance of having a bad
outcome
is maybe greater than your risk of
getting
a bad outcome from taking the
vaccine.
"But
what they don't take into consideration
is
that you may be very, very unlikely to
ever
get the disease. It is not easily
contagious.
It is often a lifestyle or
occupational
factor, something that you are
not
likely to get in casual contact."
Barbara
Loe Fisher of NVIC agrees. "You know
you
don't get hepatitis B by being next to
someone
who sneezed in an elevator. It's not
like
whooping cough or the measles. This is
a
very different kind of disease to require
children
to be vaccinated for."
"We're
taught to believe that vaccinations
are
safe and effective," Kristin Jennings
said.
"We all buy into that - I, as a new
mother,
did. I'm not against all
vaccinations.
Every parent should have the
right
to choose what is right for their
child.
"But
with the hepatitis B vaccine ? it is
criminal
to require it to be given to a
newborn.
They are not in a high-risk
category."
Kevin
B. O'Reilly may be reached by email at
cyberstoic@free-market.net.
-30-
from
The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 5, No
18,
April 30, 2001
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