Are Vaccinations Safe And Effective? by Jane Thurnell-Read

Many parents and travellers are concerned about the impact of vaccination on health, whether or not it is safe or has adverse effects on both children and adults. When my children were young, I looked at the evidence and decided not to have them vaccinated. It is always going to be a difficult decision and there are possible risks regardless of whether or not you have your child vaccinated. Travellers sometimes have to be vaccinated to enter a particular country, but some vaccinations are recommended but optional.

Is the decline in childhood infectious illness really attributable to vaccination programmes?

The decline in childhood infectious illnesses is often hailed as proof that the vaccination programme is working, but scarlet fever has shown a similar pattern of decline even though there had been no immunisation programme. Many of the infectious diseases were in decline because of improvements in hygiene etc. even before the immunisation programme was introduced.

Many doctors will not diagnose a patient as suffering from a particular infection if the patient has been immunised against it, even if the patient is showing all the symptoms of having the disease; sometimes this leads to a “renaming” of diseases, e.g. symptoms of polio in vaccinated people are often classified as aseptic meningitis rather than polio. When I took one of my children to the doctor because he had a rash, he first asked me if he'd been vaccinated. I said 'no', so then he was quite happy to diagnose that he had measles. Presumably if I'd said 'yes', he would have diagnosed something else instead.

The risk of immunisation may be much greater than medically recognized because:

• Many of the medical studies showing limited side-effects have only looked at the effects for a few days after immunisation.
• Some of the effect of the vaccination may be there immediately but not easily observable. e.g. has been suggested that immunisation alters the ratio of T-helper cells and T-suppresser cells; this could be a factor in the increase in allergies among children.
• Some immunisations are only temporary or give partial immunity; they become ineffective during adult life when the complications of the disease are much more dangerous.
• Natural immunity gives life-time protection; natural immunity is gained from childhood illness when the disease is generally mild in well nourished children (e.g. measles can cause blindness but if Vitamin A is given at the same time the possibilities of complications are dramatically reduced).
• Lack of natural immunity could mean that mothers are unable to pass on placental immunity to their babies, making babies too young to be vaccinated susceptible to measles, etc.
• Live attenuated viruses are capable of reversion to wild-type parent strains capable of producing disease in inoculated people.
• Reducing the prevalence of one strain of a virus can allow another possibly more deadly strain to proliferate.
• After vaccination cell-mediated immunity is suppressed for a time- this can allow infection in or allow a latent infection to become an acute attack.
• There have been suggestions that multiple sclerosis and even HIV susceptibility may be linked to mass vaccination programs.

So what are the alternatives? 

Lynne McTaggart’s book Vaccination Bible  is excellent and suggests alternatives using homeopathy and herbalism. Some homeopathic pharmacies will also recommend possible alternatives. None of these alternatives guarantee to protect you or your child completely, but neither does anything else.