Pertussis Vaccines and Pie Crust Promises
let's give some perspective to the "vaccines save lives" assertion
I’m seeing a lot of fear “whoopla” around Pertussis, aka Whooping Cough.
Here’s a sample of Public Health Newspeak around Pertussis:
Pertussis is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by a bacterium that lives in the mouth, nose and throat of an infected person. It can be particularly severe in infants, who often catch it from older siblings or caregivers who do not know they are carrying it, according to the New Jersey Department of Health…
…“The very young and older adults are most at risk for severe disease,” Avallone said. “Tdap vaccination is protective against pertussis and is recommended for pregnant women between weeks 27 to 36 of pregnancy. This recommendation is to provide protection to the infant after birth.
“Adults should get a single dose of Tdap vaccine followed by a booster in 10-year increments. Pertussis vaccine is also on the pediatric schedule of vaccinations children need to enter school. We especially encourage adults who will be around infants (relatives, dads, grandparents, child care providers etc.) to receive Tdap vaccination.”
While it isn’t common for vaccinated people to get pertussis, it can happen, Avallone said. “However, even if someone does get pertussis after vaccination, the symptoms are often more mild,” she said.
Interestingly, at a recent BOH meeting, Megan Avallone, Director of the Regional BOH, explained that the reported cases of pertussis had been in fully vaccinated people. She also noted that pertussis was presenting differently than the traditional “whooping” cough. So unless something has changed over the last month or so, this article poorly represents the truth as it’s occurring locally.
What is the truth?
What I’m finding is that selected shades of truth may be even more deceptive that outright lies, since we tend to lean into any truth that resonates.
What we need for the purpose of informed consents is a full spectrum of truth. So let’s add in some layers as we explore the necessity, efficacy and safety of these shots.
Do we need pertussis vaccines?
Any proper risk/benefit analysis for a medication/vaccine should first include a clear understanding of the risks of disease.
So how scary is pertussis in a developed country today?
The part you are likely to hear looks something like this:
Pertussis or whooping cough is a highly contagious disease associated with uncontrollable coughing. In advanced stages, thick mucus can accumulate and interfere with breathing by potentially constricting air passages, triggering violent episodes of coughing that can have a high-pitched “whooping” sound. In some cases the build-up of mucous can cause choking or vomiting. Pertussis is most dangerous in infants under six months of age. Potential complications can include pneumonia, and rarely, seizures and brain disease.
However, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) incorporates some much needed nuance into our risk benefit equation.
In 1922, there were 107,473 pertussis cases reported in the U.S. with 5,099 deaths.12 In the United States, deaths from pertussis infections dropped by more than 75% between 1922 and 1948, the year before the DPT vaccine was licensed. Mortality associated with pertussis declined dramatically in the 1940’s as living conditions improved.13
In other words, improved living conditions have changed the risk profile of many of the diseases we have learned to fear. This pattern shows up repeatedly. It’s something Dr. Suzanne Humphries has explored in detail in her book Dissolving Illusions.
*note the drop in scarlet fever rates despite there being no vaccine for it.
Furthermore, the way we live and our background health picture will profoundly influence how our bodies respond to exposures.
So we may want to revisit whether there is a legitimate need for pertussis vaccines, particularly as we consider their safety and efficacy.
The truth about pertussis vaccine efficacy…
In his recent Substack, Aaron Siri addresses one of the critical questions:
Do the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccines used in the United States stop infection and transmission of the pertussis bacterium?
“Yes” or “No”?
When picking an answer, keep in mind that the pertussis vaccine is part of a combination vaccine (DTap or Tdap) mandated to attend grades K-12 in every U.S. state – it is the “P” in DTaP and the “p” in Tdap – and the justification for this rights-crushing mandate is the belief that the vaccine prevents transmission of pertussis in the school setting.
The answer is “No”! In 1999, the CDC recommended “exclusive use of acellular pertussis vaccines for all doses of the pertussis vaccine series” and that vaccine does not prevent transmission.
…Incredibly, the immunity provided by pertussis vaccines, while potentially reducing symptoms of the disease, actually renders those receiving these products susceptible to repeated infection with pertussis; meaning, it increases the potential to spread this bacterium because it renders those vaccinated repeat-asymptomatic-carriers. (See this study, “Lack of mucosal immune responses after aPV administration favor infection, persistent colonization, and transmission of the pathogen”, and this study, “Because of linked-epitope suppression, all children who were primed by DTaP vaccines will be more susceptible to pertussis throughout their lifetimes, and there is no easy way to decrease this increased lifetime susceptibility.
A study led by Christopher Gill at the Boston University School of Public Health supports this assertion:
“This disease is back because we didn’t really understand how our immune defenses against whooping cough worked, and did not understand how the vaccines needed to work to prevent it,” said Christopher J. Gill, associate professor of global health and lead author of the article. “Instead we layered assumptions upon assumptions, and now find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of admitting that we may made some crucial errors. This is definitely not where we thought we’d be in 2017.”
Up until the 1950s, there were millions of cases of whooping cough around the globe each year, with numerous fatal cases in infants. The introduction of whole-cell pertussis (wP) vaccines led to a 99 percent reduction in cases. Later, as wP vaccines raised concerns of possible rare neurologic adverse events, aP vaccines were licensed and used in a number of countries starting in the early 1990s. Since then, cases of whooping cough have risen sharply. In 2014, there were more than 32,000 cases reported in the US.
Perhaps that explains why outbreaks continue to occur in fully vaccinated communities.
Nearly 50 students at Harvard-Westlake School have been recently diagnosed with whooping cough, in an outbreak that has forced school officials to send students home at the first sign of illness.
But all of the sick students had been vaccinated against the disease, according to school officials. In fact, all 90 people who have recently come down with pertussis — the official name for whooping cough — in Los Angeles County this year had been immunized against it, according to county officials. *emphasis mine.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-whooping-cough-vaccine-20190316-story.html
Since the acellular pertussis vaccines we used today do not stop infection or transmission, but instead create silent or asymptomatic carriers, they do nothing to protect others and may amplify the risk of spread.
The safety of pertussis vaccines
As with many vaccines, pertussis vaccines have had a bumpy history.
We started out with whole cell pertussis vaccines (DPT), which were used introduced in the 1930’s. While their use was associated with considerable reductions in reported cases of pertussis, they were linked to encephalopathy and death:
Because of alleged reactions (encephalopathy and death), several countries discontinued (Sweden) or markedly decreased (United Kingdom, Germany, Japan) use of the vaccine.
The DPT vaccines, and resulting lawsuits claiming injuries, had a major role in the creation of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which was “the first U.S. law to officially acknowledge that childhood vaccines licensed and recommended by the federal government, which are routinely mandated for school attendance by state governments, can and do injure and kill a minority of children,” according to NVIC.
While medical establishment clings tightly to its selectively applied “correlation is not causation” mantra, the US has discontinued the use of DPT and there is significant evidence to demonstrate that pertussis vaccines do more harm than good.
DPT (whole cell pertussis) vaccines
Danish scientist, Peter Aaby, spent much of his career studying the non-specific effects of vaccines. In 1978, he established the Bandim Health Project, a health and demographic surveillance system site in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. His research linked DPT vaccination to increases in overall mortality in the children who received the shots.
Conclusion: Although having better nutritional status and being protected against three infections, 6-35 months old DTP-vaccinated children tended to have higher mortality than DTP-unvaccinated children. All studies of the introduction of DTP have found increased overall mortality. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29616207/
Peter C. Gøtzsche made similar findings:
In 2012, SAGE requested that the WHO review the evidence concerning the possible effects of DTP vaccines on mortality1. In a new expert report, Peter C. Gøtzsche, Professor, DrMedSci, MSc analyzed the WHO systematic review as well as any studies published after the WHO report that assessed the effect of DTP vaccine on total mortality. This new expert report concludes that the "evidence tells us that it is likely that the DTP vaccine increases total mortality in low-income countries." 2
This echoes the conclusion by Peter Aaby – a highly acclaimed scientist renowned for studying and promoting vaccines in Africa - that "all currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis. Though a vaccine protects children against the target disease it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections."
DTaP and Tdap (acellular pertussis vaccines)
DTP is no longer used in the United States. We now have DTaP and Tdap vaccines that use acellular/inactivated pertussis antigen, and pertussis rates have risen sharply since they replaced DPT in the 1990s due to their poor efficacy.
Depending on the manufacturer, acellular pertussis shots may contain formaldehyde, polysorbate 80 (Tween 80), gluteraldehyde, 2-phenoxoyethanol, aluminum, thimerosal (mercury) and other toxic substances.
According to NVIC:
Parents should monitor their children carefully day and night for at least 72 hours after vaccination.19 Pertussis vaccine has been documented to cause high fever; severe local reactions at the site of the injection; high pitched screaming and uncontrollable crying; collapse/shock (hypotonic/hyporesponsive episode); lethargy (excessive sleepiness); convulsions with or without fever; and brain inflammation (encephalopathy).20
As of March 1, 2024, there had been 6,154 claims filed in the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) for injuries and deaths following pertussis-containing vaccination, including 869 deaths and 5,285 serious injuries.
Using the MedAlerts search engine, as of February 23, 2024, there had been 187,998 adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in connection with pertussis-containing vaccines since 1990. Nearly half of those serious pertussis vaccine-related adverse events occurring in children under the age of three. Of these pertussis-vaccine related adverse event reports to VAERS, 3,348 were deaths, with nearly 86 percent of the deaths occurring in children under three years of age.
And while the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends Tdap for expecting mothers, manufacturers acknowledge that their safety and effectiveness has “not been established in pregnant women”.
In summary, while pertussis can pose risks, it is no longer the threat that it once and fatality rates dropped precipitously before any vaccine was introduced. The initial (DPT) vaccine prevented reports of pertussis, but was associated with increases overall mortality in children as well as encephalopathy. It was then replaced with acellular pertussis vaccines that do not stop infection or transmission, is linked to a rise in pertussis cases and continues to be associated with serious adverse events.
So does it really make sense to get this series of shots?
You decide.
(2 of 2) Every vaccine is intended to reduce infection, severity and/or transmission of infectious diseases whose current level of prevalence, transmission and severity is much higher than it would be if everyone supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently (as ratios of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity) to attain at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D which the immune system needs to function properly. Many people have half this, or less.
Therefore vaccines should come second to efforts to get everyone's immune system working properly - which can only be done with proper vitamin D3 supplementation. (There is very little vitamin D3 in foods, fortified or not. UV-B radiation on ideally white skin can produce plenty of vitamin D3, but it is not available all year round - and damages DNA, so raising the risk of skin cancer.) See Prof. Sunil Wimalawansa's recommendations: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-how-much and https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/how-much-vitamin-d3-to-take.
There's not a lot of research into vitamin D and pertussis. However, it is a bacterial infection, and everyone should be aware of 2014 research by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that with 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) or more pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D (as measured in "vitamin D" blood tests), the risk, separately, of hospital acquired infections and surgical site infections was about 2.5%.
This is Quraishi et al. 2014: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/1782085. See discussion and clearer, combined, graphs at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-50ngmL.
With 18 ng/mL preoperative circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is common for many people who have not had a lot of ultraviolet B exposure on ideally white skin, and who do not supplement vitamin D3 properly, the risk of each type of infection rose to 25%.
This shows that serious and potentially deadly weakness in the immune system - here regarding the bacterial pathogens which cause both types of post-operative infection - is caused by 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels which are normal in most countries.
In the absence of proper vitamin D3 supplementation, people with dark skin who live far from the equator have even lower 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels than the white skinned people who live there. This is probably the biggest preventable cause of the well known health disparities which afflict dark skinned and/or sun-avoidant people who live far from the equator.
There is very little vitamin D3 in food, fortified or not. There is no such thing as "vitamin D rich foods" which can provide sufficient vitamin D3 to meet the needs of the immune system, though such foods can provide enough, for people with very little skin-produced or supplemental vitamin D3 intake, to enable the kidneys to better regulate calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism, at least to avoid the childhood developmental bone condition rickets.
To attain a healthy level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D circulating in the bloodstream without the need for blood tests or medical monitoring, without excessive UV-B skin exposure, it is necessary to take an average daily amount of supplemental vitamin D3 which is calculated as a ratio of body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity.
Please see such recommendations, from New Jersey based Professor of Medicine, at https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/how-much-vitamin-d3-to-take. These are his slight simplification, announced in an FLCCC podcast, of the recommendations in his 2022 article in Nutrition: "Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19": https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997.
For 70 kg (154 lb) body weight, without obesity, 0.125 milligrams (1/8000th of a gram = 5000 IU) vitamin D3 a day, on average, will attain a healthy 25-hydroxyvitamin D level: 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L in the UK, Australia etc.) which is 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass. This is what is measured in "vitamin D" blood tests.
This level is higher than what most doctors think is necessary, because they are only aiming to attain what is needed for proper kidney function regarding regulating calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism: 20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L).
The scarily high sounding "5000 IUs" per day is a gram every 22 years - and pharma grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram.
If everyone supplemented vitamin D3 sufficiently to attain at least the 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L) circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs to work properly, then there would be numerous benefits, including:
1 - Little or no pandemic spread of COVID-19, including current more infectious variants, even in a population which had no immunity to SARS-CoV-2 due to prior infection or vaccination. Handwashing and not breathing, sneezing or coughing into most other people's faces are always good ideas, but there would be no need for masks, social distancing, lockdowns, real vaccines (Novavax) or the quasi-vaccine gene-therapy injections (Pfizer and Moderna mRNA - and AstraZeneca and J&J adenovirus vector).
There would be many fewer infected people, primarily due to each infected person having a less severe disease and so shedding fewer viruses. R0 would be below the pandemic level of 1.0 in almost all circumstances - the possible exceptions being people in confined spaces such as hospitals or submarines. Those infected would much more rarely need hospitalisation or die, assuming that inexpensive, generally safe, effective, treatments such as ivermectin were used in hospitals, or for outpatients with, or at significant risk of developing, serious symptoms.
2 - Likewise influenza and other infectious diseases, including pertussis (whooping cough).
3 - Greatly reduced rates of sepsis, which killed about 11 million people worldwide in 2017.
4 - Reduced risk of in-utero, peri-natal and neurodevelopmental problems including low birth weight, pre-eclampsia, autism, intellectual disability schizophrenia and ADHD: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2.
5 - *Greatly* reduced risk of neurodegenerative disease: Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, multiple system atrophy, Alzheimer's disease etc.: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3.
6 - Reduced risk and severity of numerous inflammatory auto-immune diseases.
(1 of 2) Thanks very much for this article. Some, perhaps most, vaccines or quasi-vaccines are over-rated.
(The mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 injections are not vaccines according to long-standing definitions, since they do not provide an antigen to stimulate an immune response. They are gene therapies, by the EU definition, since they use genetic techniques to program human cells to generate facsimiles of the viral spike protein. These protein molecules are the antigens which stimulate the immune response, which destroy each such cell and, ideally, builds long-lasting immunity against viruses which have similar spike proteins on their surface.)
For instance, robust research, including Anderson et al. 2020 https://sci-hub.se/10.7326/M19-3075 shows that influenza vaccination does not reduce hospitalisation or death due to influenza or other respiratory diseases in 65 year olds. Due to a government campaign, the proportion of people in England and Wales who take the annual influenza vaccine jumps from 27% at age 64 to 57% at age 66. Yet there is no corresponding step change in hospitalisation or death. Both hospitalisation and death rise smoothly with age. See the graphs at: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/influenza-vaccines-do-not-reduce and discussion of further research at: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/influenza-vaccines-do-not-reduce-1da.
See also Igor Chudov's article https://www.igor-chudov.com/p/influenza-vaccine-is-perfect-example on influenza vaccine effectiveness. Even by their dodgy methods of calculating this, since there are no placebo-controlled randomized controlled trial, the VE figures are modestly positive and negative, with a very wide range of uncertainty. Here with their 95% confidence ranges in brackets, are the supposed percentages of effectiveness (positive is protective, negative increases the risk of hospitalization):
+11% (-19 to +33%) To 18 years.
+26% (-14 to +52%) 18 - 64 years.
-3% (-54 to +31%) 65+ years.
This protection was described as "low to non-significant".
We can easily tell that the authorities, with many medical professionals following their guidance, are either knowingly lying to us, or at least are egregiously ignorant of the best research, regarding the actual protection afforded by these influenza vaccines, which they recommend annually for everyone of 6 months age or more.
We the public rightfully expects all these supposed experts, whose salaries we pay, to be honest about the risks and benefits of all the medical interventions they are responsible for. We shouldn't have to read research articles ourselves to find out the truth.
This condition of systematic over-promotion of vaccines in general (I guess some are genuinely safe enough, effective and worth taking for at least some subset of the population) persists in large part due to the failings of the majorities of whole professions, worldwide: medical professionals, vaccinologists, virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, public health officials, academic publishers and the mainstream media.
This decades-old cult of overly estimating the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is also driven, directly, by many people - probably the majority of the public - hoping and choosing to believe that their immune systems can be significantly strengthened, for each specific disease, by a small, symbolically painful and so sacrificial, steely injection by a member of the medical priesthood, of a fluid devised by team of PhDs working for great international corporations, produced by high-tech methods in precisely controlled conditions.
Far too many people regard any challenge to their cherished, faith based (they don't read the research) belief in the value of vaccines as an attempt to increase "vaccine hesitancy". What they really want is for everyone to get *vaccinated*. The word is often pronounced with maximum emphasis, as if it is a singular and overridingly beneficial *good* - and indeed a public *duty* by which each person can prevent themselves from carrying a pernicious disease which is likely to infect other people.
Far too many people dismiss those questioning the vaccinophilic orthodoxy as troublemakers - those who shirk, and encourage other to shirk, their responsibility to society, which is to get *vaccinated* as experts recommend.
This siding with the corrupted so-called experts blinds many people to the seriousness of the situation, which would take a very long description, but which includes corruption of government and the medical profession, billions of dollars spent researching infectious diseases - all of which would be less of a problem if everyone supplemented enough vitamin D3 for their immune systems to work properly (see my second comment and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/) - with some of that research leading to gain of function work on viruses, which in one instance at least *caused* a pandemic of worldwide disastrous proportions: SARS-CoV-2 -> COVID-19. https://vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/
Furthermore, this corrupted interlocked system of researchers, pharmaceutical companies and others has for four years covered up the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2. They argue that the virus arose from zoonotic transfer, and so argue that *more* virological research, including gain of function research, is required to prepare humanity for future pandemics (they imply that all pandemics of novel pathogens result from zoonotic transfer). A key part of their argument and belief in the urgency of such research is their belief that the best, or only, way of tackling such pandemics is **vaccination** - and that all this research is necessary to the rapid development and deployment of vaccines.
Until recently I had believed that it was our duty, as adults, to be vaccinated against pertussis, partly to protect ourselves, but most importantly to prevent ourselves from infecting newborns and infants who were at serious risk of harm or death from this disease, and who were too young to be vaccinated.
Now I have learned that while this may have been true of the cellular pertussis vaccines, that these were abandoned over a decade ago due to the harm and death they inflicted on some children (adults as well?) and that the new acellular pertussis vaccine is well known, by researchers at least, to be ineffective at stopping transmission. For instance, from Warfel et al. 2013, "Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model" https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1314688110 .
Now we learn that these acellular vaccines not only do little or nothing to stop transmission from an infected person, or to stop a person from being infected, but that they may increase transmission by increasing the chance of infection and/or by increasing severity and/or that the infection may be asymptomatic, so the infected person does not know to isolate themselves.
Since these so-called experts, deliberately or out of ignorance, systematically mislead the public about the risks and benefits of both influenza and pertussis vaccines, and since they have done so spectacularly with the mRNA and adenovirus vector COVID-19 so-called vaccines, there is no reason to trust, on face value, anything they tell the public about vaccines, infectious diseases or any other health matter.
This leaves us in the unfortunate position of having to do our own research in fields which are complex and contentious, in order to protect ourselves firstly from the diseases in question and from the frequently harmful interventions which the so-called experts recommend we accept and pay for.