Vaccines show sinister side
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Georgia Straight, Canada
Vaccines show sinister side
By Pieta Woolley
Publish Date: 23-Mar-2006
If two dozen once-jittery mice at UBC are telling the truth postmortem, the
world's governments may soon be facing one hell of a lawsuit. New,
so-far-unpublished research led by Vancouver neuroscientist Chris Shaw shows
a link between the aluminum hydroxide used in vaccines, and symptoms
associated with Parkinson's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou
Gehrig's disease), and Alzheimer's.
Shaw is most surprised that the research for his paper hadn't been done
before. For 80 years, doctors have injected patients with aluminum
hydroxide, he said, an adjuvant that stimulates immune response.
"This is suspicious," he told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview from
his lab near Heather Street and West 12th Avenue. "Either this [link] is
known by industry and it was never made public, or industry was never made
to do these studies by Health Canada. I'm not sure which is scarier."
Similar adjuvants are used in the following vaccines, according to Shaw's
paper: hepatitis A and B, and the Pentacel cocktail, which vaccinates
against diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, and a type of meningitis.
To test the link theory, Shaw and his four-scientist team from UBC and
Louisiana State University injected mice with the anthrax vaccine developed
for the first Gulf War. Because Gulf War Syndrome looks a lot like ALS, Shaw
explained, the neuroscientists had a chance to isolate a possible cause. All
deployed troops were vaccinated with an aluminum hydroxide compound.
Vaccinated troops who were not deployed to the Gulf developed similar
symptoms at a similar rate, according to Shaw.
After 20 weeks studying the mice, the team found statistically significant
increases in anxiety (38 percent); memory deficits (41 times the errors as
in the sample group); and an allergic skin reaction (20 percent). Tissue
samples after the mice were "sacrificed" showed neurological cells were
dying. Inside the mice's brains, in a part that controls movement, 35
percent of the cells were destroying themselves.
"No one in my lab wants to get vaccinated," he said. "This totally creeped
us out. We weren't out there to poke holes in vaccines. But all of a sudden,
oh my God-we've got neuron death!"
At the end of the paper, Shaw warns that "whether the risk of protection
from a dreaded disease outweighs the risk of toxicity is a question that
demands our urgent attention."
He's not the only one considering that.
The charge that there's a sinister side to magic bullets isn't new. With his
pen blazing, celebrity journalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. popularized vaccine
scepticism with his article arguing that mercury in vaccines causes autism,
which ran in the June 2005 Rolling Stone and on-line at Salon.com. So did
last year's vaccines-linked-to- autism bestseller, Evidence of Harm by David
Kirby (St. Martin's Press). But there's a potential public-health cost to
all the controversy, according to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
"Vaccines have been a victim of their own success," spokesperson Ian Roe
told the Straight in a telephone interview from Ottawa. Diseases such as
polio, which killed his father-in-law, are almost eradicated and therefore
no longer serve as a warning to parents. But the epidemic threat is still
real. "If everyone decided to not get vaccinated, we'd live in a very
different world."
Canada's last national immunization conference, in December 2004, heard a
report that vaccine coverage is sometimes low. For diphtheria, the Public
Health Agency of Canada found that just 75 percent of two-year-olds are
immunized; the target is 99 percent. For tetanus, just 66 percent of
17-year-olds are immunized, compared to a target of 97 percent.
Dr. Ronald Gold, the former head of the infectious-disease division at
Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, told the conference that "we will
never be without an anti-vaccine movement," but "in reality, there is no
scientific evidence for these myths."
Shaw acknowledges that there's a lot of pressure on parents to vaccinate
their children. "You're considered to be a really bad parent if you don't
vaccinate," he said-and your child can't attend public school. "But I don't
think the safety of vaccines is demarcated. How does a parent make a
decision based on what's available? You can't make an intelligent decision."
Conservatively, he said, if one percent of vaccinated humans develop ALS
from vaccine adjuvants, it would still constitute a health emergency.
It's possible, he said, that there are 10,000 studies that show aluminum
hydroxide is safe for injections. But he hasn't been able to find any that
look beyond the first few weeks of injection. If anyone has a study that
shows something different, he said, please "put it on the table. That's how
you do science."
Neuroscience research is difficult, Shaw said, because symptoms can take
years to manifest, so it's hard to prove what caused the symptoms.
"To me, that calls for better testing, not blind faith."
He pointed out that George W. Bush passed legislation that opens the door
for the USA to order a nationwide anthrax immunization campaign, with the
threat of bioterrorism.
Shaw's paper is currently undergoing a peer review.
