Table of Contents
Introduction
On January 9, the New York Times published an article written by Dr. Peter J. Hotez titled “You Are Unvaccinated and Got Sick. These Are Your Odds.” His purpose in writing is to persuade parents to vaccinate their children according to the routine schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To that end, he purports to compare “the dangerous effects of three diseases with the minimal side effects of their corresponding vaccines.”
“To state it bluntly,” Hotez writes, “being unvaccinated can result in illness or death. Vaccines, in contrast, are extremely unlikely to lead to side effects, even minor ones like fainting.” He laments that “vaccination rates have fallen”, resulting in a resurgence of measles globally. He cites the example of Samoa, where “almost 5,700 measles cases have been recorded since September, resulting in at least 83 deaths. Almost all of those who died were young children.” In the US, he writes, “vaccine hesitancy is contributing to” measles outbreaks.
Hotez presents data ostensibly to enable parents “to compare the risks of becoming ill with measles . . . to the minute chances of experiencing side effects from their corresponding vaccines.” (He also presents risk analyses for the influenza and human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccines, but due to time constraints and the emphasis placed on it by the media, I’m focusing here just on measles). Here is how he graphically presents the data for his risk analysis:
Hotez goes on to assert, “Moreover, new research reveals that, even when patients recover, the measles virus can suppress the immune system, rendering children susceptible to serious infections like pneumonia and the flu.”
The reason parents are choosing not to get their children the measles vaccine, he claims, is because they believe “misinformation spread after an article implying a link between measles vaccinations and autism was published in The Lancet in 1998; it was retracted in 2010 over concerns about the validity of the results and the conduct of the study. Nevertheless, the false claim that vaccines can cause autism continued to circulate on the internet and social media. The truth is that we have overwhelming evidence from at least six studies involving more than one million children that measles-mumps-rubella vaccinations do not cause autism.”
The Times presents Hotez as a scientist and pediatrician at the Baylor College of Medicine, and in recent years he’s become a leading go-to “expert” for the mainstream media on the topic of vaccines. Undisclosed by the Times is that he’s also a vaccine developer who holds several patents for vaccines against tropical diseases and co-director of the school’s Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
In 2017, the center entered a partnership with the German pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA to advance development of vaccines for tropical diseases (not to be confused with Merck & Co., the US vaccine manufacturer). The center’s purpose, in his own words, is to “secure funding and advance the development of drugs, vaccines, and other health tools . . . that currently the pharmaceutical companies are unable to invest in due to inabilities to promise shareholder returns.”
Since pharmaceutical companies view certain proposed vaccine products as an unprofitable venture, the costs are subsidized through “product development partnerships” like Baylor’s. As Hotez explains, a key source of funds is the government, meaning that the costs of vaccine development are being subsidized by the taxpayers.
“Fueling investor hesitancy”, he explains in a paper in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, “are the recent shortcomings and public reactions to newly introduced vaccines for malaria and dengue despite billion-dollar investments from Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur, respectively, on top of an accelerating global antivaccine movement.”
He doesn’t illuminate why the public had negative reactions to these vaccines. The reason this was so for GSK’s malaria vaccine was that, while it was shown to be initially effective, the protective effect waned over time and after five years of follow up resulted in children being at an increased risk of infection from malaria parasites.
The reason this was so for Sanofi’s dengue vaccine was that, after it was implemented into the childhood schedule the Philippines upon the recommendation of the World Health Organization (WHO) and hundreds of thousands of doses were administered under the pretense of a proven “safe” vaccine, it was likewise shown to increase the risk of serious dengue infection among children who had not already experienced a prior infection.
The public outrage was all the more pronounced because it was also learned that Sanofi, Philippines health officials, and the WHO had ignored early warnings that the vaccine might cause precisely that outcome.
It is highly instructive that Hotez views the problem not as the proven untrustworthiness of the pharmaceutical companies and government health agencies, but rather the inability of the industry to fund products that are dangerous and cost ineffective.
It’s equally instructive that he mindlessly dismisses public opposition as mere “antivaccine” sentiment attributable to some monolithic “movement” rather than reflecting parents’ legitimate concerns, including anger over entire populations being used essentially as subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment without informed consent.
Relevantly, the decline in vaccination rates in the Philippines was a result of this rightful erosion of public trust, which is attributed with causing a major measles outbreak in 2017.
Superficially, the measles risk analysis Hotez presents to New York Times readers is persuasive. The way he presents his data, it’s a no-brainer that parents in the US should vaccinate their children since the risks from measles so obviously outweigh the risks from the vaccine.
But Hotez is preying on people’s ignorance by presenting an invalid risk-benefit analysis that is not serious and does not address parents’ legitimate concerns about vaccinating their children strictly according to the CDC’s schedule.
Rather, the article is transparently intended to deceive parents about the risks in order to scare them into compliance. This can be demonstrated by examining some of the major problems with his presented analysis.
Problem 1: The Measles Vaccination Rate in the US Has Not Fallen
In the context of his claim that “vaccination rates have fallen”, Hotez adds that “vaccine hesitancy is contributing to” measles outbreaks in the US. However, it’s not true that vaccination rates in the US have fallen. In fact, the trend has been an increase in the national vaccination rate over time, according to CDC data. Here’s what the data looks like graphed over time for the percentage of children aged 19 to 35 months who’ve received one or more doses of the measles vaccine, with a linear trendline:
And here’s what the CDC’s data show for the measles vaccination rate for kindergarten-aged children, again with trendline (this dataset starts at 2009, and no data is available for the 2010-11 school year):
Of course, there is variation in vaccination rates year to year, and vaccination rates certainly vary by community, but Hotez’s suggestion that the trend in the US is a general decline in the vaccination rate is false. The vaccination rate for school-aged children has rather remained steady over time between 94 percent and 95 percent, and if anything has trended upward.
Well done, good research, and again, your an exceptional writer. Much of this is new to me. I, too, have become obsessed with the topic. The consequences are staggering. Add to this threat the decline of our environment and food … could this be a planned “culling” of the bottom tier of mankind?
Let’s put aside all the rhetoric and get down to the nitty gritty as the saying goes.
Wild Type Measles or the Genotype A strain is on the decline. It has been replaced by mutations of the Genotype A Measles virus. Dr. Wakefield gave an excellent talk on the Highwire show a couple of months ago. There are currently 19 Measles Genotypes or Clads recognized by the CDC and the WHO:
The following 19 Genotypes have been detected since 1990:
A*, B2, B3, C1, C2, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7, D8, D9, D10, D11, G2, G3, H1, H2
*All vaccine strains (e.g. Moraten, Edmonston-Zagreb) are genotype A.
During 2014, six genotypes were identified by global surveillance:
B3, D4, D8, D9, G3, H1(B3 was detected in NY in 2005).
The vaccine is Genotype A and it is unable to neutralize the mutations. In a newly released Editorial Commentary,
Is There a Correlate of Protection for Measles Vaccine?
Stanley A. Plotkin, Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and 2Vaxconsult, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, makes the following admissions:
-“…the fully protective level of neutralizing antibodies is not known” (he is referring to the Genotype A vaccines ability to neutralize the new Genotypes)
-“However, the vaccine gives an attenuated infection, and it is not the case that antibody levels remain permanently elevated in vaccinees. The current situation is responsible for reevaluation of the long-term efficacy of measles vaccine”
(this is an admission that the vaccine infects the individual it’s given to. An attenuated infection is still an infection and one of the issues documented in the book “Fear of the Invisible” by Janine Roberts who attended vaccine meetings here and in the UK is vaccine scientist don’t ever know if a virus is attenuated enough or at all. She quotes Dr. Maurice Hilleman as saying it’s expected 20% of children given the Measles vaccine will become ill.
-“..the circulation of new Genotypes of measles virus (as well as mumps) make vaccination campaigns ineffective”
The circulating strains Plotkin’s is referring to are Genotype B3 and D8. Here is what the papers says about them:
……as in the case of mumps vaccine the circulation of new measles virus genotypes may be important. Genotypes B3 and D8 are now circulating, and these viruses are not as well neutralized by antibodies to the vaccine genotype (ie, genotype A) as by antibodies raised against the new strains [9]. Even more importantly, a minority of vaccinees lose antibodies with time and thus become susceptible to infection with wild measles virus.
People are unaware that the measles virus has mutated, predominately in higher vaccinated areas and in some cases is unable to be neutralized by antibodies, causing a rise in measles outbreaks even among the vaccinated. These are what’s causing the outbreaks. 2019 Measles outbreak in the US were caused by measles wild-type D8 or B3. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html. CDC on their webpage calls these strains wild-types but Dr. Wakefield who has spend decades studying the Measles virus states they are mutations from the original Genotype A. Also Dr. Gregory Poland wrote a paper in 1994: Arch Intern Med. 1994 Aug 22;154(16):1815-20.
Failure to reach the goal of measles elimination. Apparent paradox of measles infections in immunized persons.
Poland GA1, Jacobson RM Conclusion: The apparent paradox is that as measles immunization rates rise to high levels in a population, measles becomes a disease of immunized persons.
-Disney Measles outbreak:
The Journal of Clinical Microbiology, entitled, “Rapid Identification of Measles Virus Vaccine Genotype by Real-Time PCR,” has discovered . As it turns out, a large number of measles outbreaks are actually “vaccine reactions” from the measles vaccine itself (MMR vaccines) aka Vaccine Induced Measles.
“During measles outbreaks, it is important to be able to rapidly distinguish between measles cases and vaccine reactions to avoid unnecessary outbreak response measures such as case isolation and contact investigations,” the study authors write. “We have developed a real-time reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) method specific for genotype A measles virus (MeV) (MeVA RT-quantitative PCR [RT-qPCR]) that can identify measles vaccine strains rapidly, with high throughput, and without the need for sequencing to determine the genotype.”
During the measles outbreak in California in 2015, a large number of suspected cases occurred in recent vaccinees (3). Of the 194 measles virus sequences obtained in the United States in 2015, 73 were identified as vaccine sequences (R. J. McNall, unpublished data).
In other words, measles outbreaks were occurring among children who were already vaccinated with the measles. If you do the math, nearly 38% of the genetic sequences that were conducted on supposed “measles” cases turned out to identify measles strains that originated in the vaccines themselves. Thus, more than one out of three cases of measles in the United States was actually a reaction from a measles vaccine, not “wild-type” measles.
https://jcm.asm.org/content/55/3/735
The Genotypes circulating in the Disney outbreaks-were B3 (73 specimens), D4, D8 & H1. 31 Genotype A (vaccine strain) from recently vaccinated person with a febrile rash illness. Source: California Department of Public Health.
Samoa has been in the news because of the outbreak there. What the MSM isn’t reporting is the Measles Genotypes circulating are D8 & B3. There are multiple issues with what’s happening in Samoa. The country’s infrastructure adds to the problem. What many who have been reporting on site is the rabid door to door vaccination of everyone that has been mandated. Plotkin says the Genotype A vaccine is ineffective against the mutant strains and the “protective level of neutralizing antibodies is not known”. He states the “vaccine gives an attenuated infection”. Given how the Measles vaccine suppress the immune system, given the people of Samoa are at risk because they lack Vitamin A which has shown some effectiveness against Measles, the government is escalating the outbreak. It will be interesting to see the Genotype breakdown when the crisis is over. I bet many of the people will have a vaccine strain virus in their system because they were infected by the vaccine.
Peter Hotez is just a distraction. If you watch the WHO Vaccine Summit that was held in Geneva last month you see that the WHO is worried. Very worried about the impact of the Vaccine Choice community is having around the world. Dr. Heidi Larson, PhD, Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project admits:
-doctors and nurses are “very wobbly” and “starting to question the safety of vaccines,” and it’s a “huge problem.”
-admits that the WHO’s issue with social media is not vaccine “misinformation,” but that the information “seeds doubt.”
-admits “there is a lot of safety science needed, they can’t keep repurposing old science that isn’t relevant to the new problem that vaccines are causing.”
One of the admissions I was astonished by is this:
Dr. Martin Howell Friede “admits that it’s necessary that we figure out how adjuvants work so they can start to asses how plausible it is that adjuvants are causing the major health concerns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1xey8zlyQo&t=. condensed version of the WHO vaccine summit that has been circulating the internet. WHO has the entire meeting on their website and Highwire has a presentation called WHO’s Lying.
I suspect there will be many Measles articles on MSM sites which has the words die in the title. Fear mongering always works on the uninformed. Unfortunately for pharma and the CDC the virus in China has occupied the space where they would have already started their yearly Measles campaign.
Hotez’s misstatement:
“To state it bluntly, being unvaccinated can result in illness or death. Vaccines, in contrast, are extremely unlikely to lead to side effects, even minor ones like fainting.”
I corrected it for him and the world:
“To state it bluntly, being vaccinated can result in illness or death, and at the very least, introduces dangerous known toxins to the body. Not being vaccinated, in contrast, has no side effects when combined with nutritional care.”
Oh, and vaccines are not “extremely unlikely” to cause side effects by any sane person’s standards.
Even just to show you the power of words? persuasion? mind tricks? I will revise his first sentence, which is not wrong as it is, because:
“To state it bluntly, being ALIVE can result in illness or death.”
In sum, Hotez isn’t saying much, and a lot of it is disgustingly and dangerously wrong.
My friend vaccinated her 2 kids, about 4 and 7 years old, for measles. The boy had measles 2 times within a couple years after getting vaccinated.
Another excellent article! When time permits, Mr. Hammond, I would love to see an article regarding Peter Hotez’s risk analysis for the human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccine.
I’ll keep it in mind.
Good article, except that the discussion about vaccine injuries does not even include what is by far the greatest bombshell, the automated vaccine adverse event reporting study conducted from 2006 to 2009 by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc., which flagged medical history events consistent with vaccine injury, such as acute anaphylactic reaction following vaccination. The report from the study can be found here: https://healthit.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/docs/publication/r18hs017045-lazarus-final-report-2011.pdf
Here’s what the study found: “A total of 1.4 million vaccine doses (of 45 different vaccines) were given to 376,452 individuals. Of these doses, 35,570 possible reactions (2.6 percent of vaccinations) were identified.” That corresponds to an adverse reaction per 39.4 vaccines (over 2.5%) and per 11 people who were vaccinated.
That corresponds to over 200 times the rate of 1 vaccine injury per 10,000 vaccinations stated by most vaccine propaganda, which evidently issued from VAERS reports, but with better objective veracity. If a similar under-reporting ratio applies to the averages of about 12 deaths and 50 disabilities associated with measles vaccines on VAERS we could be dealing with several times the rates of death and disability being caused by measles vaccines than measles caused in the US even prior to development of the measles vaccine.
Those figures of adverse events following measles vaccinations were annual averages of reported adverse events from a search of the VAERS data for the same period as the automated reporting study (2006-09). Unfortunately the report includes no specifics regarding particular vaccines. IF measles vaccine deaths are under-reported by a factor of 200, we could be having on the order of 2000 measles vaccine deaths per year in the US. Even half of that would be a higher rate than measles itself killed people prior to the introduction of the vaccine, which was about 500 per year at about 2/3 the national population.
I mention that study in this article:
https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2019/10/17/how-the-media-lie-about-why-parents-dont-vaccinate/
Extremely brilliant article again, Jeremy. Chapeau!! I wish I was a little richer so that I could sponsor you. Your contribution to the not yet truly existing debate about the vaccination-myth, is very effective.
Just as a small addition on the facts and figures of the measles. In Holland, where I’m from, the introduction of the measles-vaccin was in 1976. Before that year every child got the measles but according to the statistics, there was only one death per year. Already since the late fifties. At that time, in the year 1976, we had around 14 million inhabitants. The deaths in traffic accidents that year were 2440 per year. Just to give an indication.
I very much agree with you, the measles-vaccination is a matter of “the remedy is so much worse than the disease”.
Not that one death doesn’t count but with all the scientific proof that protein and vitamin A are extremely effective in curing the measles-virus, it seems pretty needless to vaccinate against it.
As you say, this nutritional aspect also totally explains why measles are such a problem in the poorest countries of the planet. Congo with its very sad amount of 6000 measles-deaths but Liberia, Madagaskar, Oekraïne, en Somalië are also very vulnerable.
I think we have to emphasize more that critical vaxxers do feel solidarity and empathy with those extremely poor countries but we just don’t see any benefit for them in vaccinating our children here. Nor does it have any long term-benefits for our own population. To give poor countries better nutrition, YES! But to make our children (even) weaker to protect children from a few viruses that are only deadly when you are malnourished, seems extremely illogical. If they stay malnourished they’ll probably die of anything, whether it’s Ebola, a bacterial infection or any ordinary kind of flu.
About Hote’s reply… I can’t believe what I’m reading.. it strikes me more and more how people who’ve been able to become so well-respected, even seen as experts in their field, can behave so very “not intelligent” in their communication. I mean, how deeply does Hote underestimate the Twitter-public when he only corrects a detail in your article…?
Then he comes back (after he more or less suggests he now has found the time to read the entire article more thoroughly) and demands for an apology.
This without defending one single point of all your very well substantiated statements and observations.. He just labels everything you say very casual and negligent as “fake Salman Rushdie dog whistles”…
As if an analogy with some religious fanatic fatwa, that was just based on a totally unfounded belief system, would have anything to do with a scientific debate. Well, at least your attempt to have one.
It is so ridiculously absurd that I really wonder what is going on in the mind of these so called “experts”. But especially in the minds of those who seem to worship them.
Last week I was so naive to start a discussion on youtube with a guy who calls himself “science guy”. He posts all kinds of articles with science links and I confronted him with the historical measles-statistics in Holland. The same figures as I stated above and that are there to read for everyone on the site of our R.I.V.M, the equivalent of your CDC.
His answer: You are parroting Suzanne Humphries! Hahahaha X 1000
I told him the RIVM probably has never heard of Suzanne and decided to end the “scientific chat”.
The amount of denial would be even more hilarious if we didn’t still have such a long way to go.
But.. The tables are turning.. Thanks again for your article, Jeremy!
Also on behalf of the growing group of critical thinkers in Holland, I wish you lots of succes!
Thank you, Saskia. Another major factor other than nutrition in measles morbidity is crowding. This is because the severity of infection has a lot to do with the dose of measles virus one is exposed to. Really, the ideal “vaccination” would be to expose a child to a small dose of the live virus under a monitored clinical setting and let the infection run its course. This would enable the child to obtain all of the benefits of infection without the risks associated with factors such as nutritional deficiencies and overcrowding, the benefits including not only lifelong immunity to the circulating wild virus and strong maternal passive immunity protecting infants, but also non-specific benefits such as reduced risks from other infectious disease, cancers, heart disease, etc.
I like how Dr. Christine Benn doesn’t mince words in an article to which your article links, Jeremy. I wish all docs and researchers were so well informed and frank:
“”No vaccines have been studied for their non-specific effects on overall health, and before we have examined these, we cannot actually determine that the vaccines are safe. In addition, our research shows that some vaccines actually increase overall mortality, especially among girls, and this is very worrying,” explains Christine Stabell Benn, Clinical Professor, University of Southern Denmark, Odense.”
https://sciencenews.dk/en/vaccines-an-unresolved-story-in-many-ways
Her comments about the HepB vaccine are also very important.
Jeremy, thank you for this excellent article! It was so frustrating to read all Hotez’s BS. You countered it beautifully.
One note, you mentioned CDC’s claim on its site that “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.” I noticed a few weeks ago that they finally removed this lie. They replaced it with a statement somewhat closer to the truth: “Vaccines Are Not Associated With Autism.”
Thank you, Justin. I just checked the CDC page I was referring to, and it still claims “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism”:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/autism.html