By Dr. Mercola

If you read the "official" vaccination guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you'll be told that vaccination is one of the best ways to protect your children (and yourself) against vaccine-preventable diseases.

You'll also be informed that vaccines are the "safe, proven choice," with serious side effects occurring only very rarely. "Discomfort or tenderness at the injection site" is reported to be the primary "risk" of vaccines, while the CDC also states "nearly all children can be safely vaccinated" and "when vaccination rates drop in a community, it's not uncommon to have an outbreak."¹

It's information that would send most parents right to their pediatrician for their child's next vaccination – unless they had researched diseases and the vaccines independently.

You see, the problem with the CDC's (and most other public health agencies') information is that it is highly biased and frequently misleading. It doesn't give you the whole story.

If you're a parent considering vaccination for your children, or an adult considering vaccination for yourself, you need to know there are risks involved that your physician probably hasn't told you about, and some vaccines are not nearly as effective as they're made out to be.

It's a matter of informed consent – you deserve to know everything about any medical procedure before you consent to it and there are risks associated with every medical procedure or pharmaceutical product, including vaccines.

Unfortunately, you won't get the full truth unless you search beyond information published by the CDC and other groups that aggressively promote vaccinations.

Leading Vaccine Researcher and Mandatory Vaccination Proponent: Measles Vaccine Can't Prevent Outbreaks

In the medical journal Vaccine,² Dr. Gregory Poland, the journal's editor-in-chief, professor of medicine and founder and leader of Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group, recently made surprising public statements about the poor effectiveness of measles vaccine in the MMR shot.

For many years, Dr. Poland has been a strong mandatory vaccination proponent and has criticized MMR vaccine safety critics but now he is taking the lead in publicly criticizing the vaccine's failure to prevent measles.

Public health agencies have been reporting measles outbreaks in the US for the past few years, which they often blame on unvaccinated individuals, despite the fact that in 2012, 95 percent of children entering kindergarten had gotten two MMR shots and so had more than 90 percent of high school students.

With this high degree of compliance with a supposedly effective measles vaccine, many people have been wondering why the U.S. is seeing a resurgence of measles cases (from January 1 to June 6, 2014, the CDC reported 397 cases of measles and 16 outbreaks in the US).³

For starters, it's important to remember that, like B. pertussis whooping cough and other infectious diseases, measles has natural cyclical increases and decreases every few years in populations.

These may occur even in highly vaccinated populations because the vaccine itself is not a guarantee of long lasting immunity and even two doses of MMR vaccine can fail to protect. According to Dr. Poland, who is conducting research at Mayo Clinic to develop new measles, mumps and rubella vaccines:⁴

"…the immune response to measles vaccine varies substantially in actual field use. Multiple studies demonstrate that 2–10% of those immunized with two doses of measles vaccine fail to develop protective antibody levels, and that immunity can wane over time and result in infection (so-called secondary vaccine failure) when the individual is exposed to measles.

For example, during the 1989–1991 U.S. measles outbreaks 20–40% of the individuals affected had been previously immunized with one to two doses of vaccine. In an October 2011 outbreak in Canada, over 50% of the 98 individuals had received two doses of measles vaccine… this phenomenon continues to play a role in measles outbreaks.

Thus, measles outbreaks also occur even among highly vaccinated populations because of primary and secondary vaccine failure, which results in gradually larger pools of susceptible persons and outbreaks once measles is introduced.

This leads to a paradoxical situation whereby measles in highly immunized societies occurs primarily among those previously immunized."

Global Eradication of Measles with MMR Vaccine 'Unlikely'

If you're surprised that the measles-containing MMR shot has such a high rate of failure, don't be. Most Americans born before 1957 experienced measles and have naturally acquired immunity, which allowed women to pass antibodies on to their babies to protect them from measles during the first year of life. Things have definitely changed in the past 60 years.

Because vaccine antibodies are different from naturally acquired measles antibodies, young vaccinated moms today cannot give longer lasting naturally acquired measles antibodies to their newborns.⁵ Vaccines simply do not confer the same kind of long lasting immunity that is obtained from experiencing and recovering from the natural disease.

Still, the World Health Organization (WHO) is partnering with government health officials, multi-national pharmaceutical corporations, and medical trade groups in a global measles eradication campaign patterned after the smallpox and polio eradication campaigns of the 20th century. The goal is to eradicate measles (and rubella) from the earth at the latest by 2020.

In order to accomplish that goal in the next six years, the plan is to make sure that at least 95 percent or more of the world's 2 billion children get two doses of MMR vaccine. With a dose of MMR vaccine costing the CDC $20 to purchase from Merck while private pediatricians pay $56 a dose, the cost of waging a global measles eradication campaign is astronomical – and likely to be a complete failure. Dr. Poland wrote:⁶

"…eradication (complete elimination of the global spread and transmission) of measles is unlikely as modeling studies suggest that herd immunity of approximately 95% or greater is required to eliminate persisting measles endemicity. Because field studies demonstrated evidence of primary vaccine failure and population levels of immunity below this threshold, the U.S., like many other countries, adopted a two-dose measles vaccination policy in the early 1990s.

However, even with two documented doses of measles vaccine, our laboratory demonstrated that 8.9% of 763 healthy children immunized a mean of 7.4 years earlier lacked protective levels of circulating measles-specific neutralizing antibodies, suggesting that even two doses of the current vaccine may be insufficient at the population level."

Families Continue to Report Vaccine Nightmares

Most physicians don't know or share this information with their patients. A documented serious side effect of vaccination, including smallpox, rabies, pertussis and MMR vaccine, is encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), which can lead to permanent brain damage. In 2012, the Italian Health Ministry conceded that the MMR vaccine caused autism in a now 11-year-old boy. The judge ruled the boy had "been damaged by irreversible complications due to vaccination (prophylaxis trivalent MMR)." Serious, permanent, and sometimes fatal reactions can and do occur, with more frequency than you might think.

In 2014, Today Australia reported one family's vaccination nightmare, in which a new father was told he had to get a shot containing B. pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine in order to visit his newborn son in the hospital nursery. He complied and suffered a rare reaction that left him partially paralyzed and near death.⁷

Also this year, the parents of Saba Button reached a settlement with an influenza vaccine manufacturer and the Australian government after it was ruled that their daughter suffered permanent brain and organ damage after getting the Fluvax shot when she was 11 months old. The settlement, which is reported to be worth millions of dollars, will help to pay for her care, but cannot ever restore her health. In his judgment, the judge said Saba suffered hypoxic brain injury as a result of an influenza vaccination that significantly shortened her lifespan and left her with "profound and permanent disabilities that will require constant care for the rest of her life."⁸

And in the US, yet another family is reporting serious reactions to the Gardasil HPV vaccine in their two children, who received it at ages 14 and 17. Both teens experienced violent seizures about three months after receiving the shots. Merck's product insert lists seizures as one of the serious adverse events that have been reported after receipt of Gardasil.⁹ Such reports receive barely a passing mention in the press, leaving many parents in the dark about the reported risks of these vaccinations.

Pediatrician Highlights Lack of Safety Studies Proving Vaccine Safety

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Many are also under the mistaken impression that appropriate safety studies have been conducted, which is not the case. There are biological, genetic, and environmental differences among us, and that is why some of us get an MMR shot or experience measles and do not suffer complications while others do suffer complications and are brain injured or die.

Doctors cannot predict ahead of time who will be harmed by a vaccine or an infectious disease -- and they cannot guarantee that those who have been vaccinated are incapable of being infected or transmitting infection, points that are not being shared with parents in the decision-making process regarding vaccination. Even the studies that have been done are not nearly long enough to show what the long-term implications of vaccinations might be.

As board-certified pediatrician Dr. Lawrence Palevsky said:

"…they are not following children long enough to know whether in three months, six months, three years, six years, or 10 years, there could be some autoimmune antibody or some immune challenge that happens to the body that lingers or that just sits there as a genotypic effect. There's a change in the genetics, there's a change in the DNA, that doesn't necessarily manifest itself until years later because of other stressors, perhaps even from another vaccine that comes years later. None of those studies have been done, so I don't know how you can say that vaccines are safe.

…We're not looking at the micro-molecular levels to see, 'Okay, was there an autoimmune antibody produced? Were there other inflammatory markers produced? Where did those markers manifest? Did they stay in the body? Did they manifest into clinical symptoms? How are they relevant?' None of that science is being done. But we're just saying that vaccines are safe, because we've been doing it for so long. And anyone with a good scientific mind would say that's not adequate."

Protect Your Right to Informed Consent and Defend Vaccine Exemptions

With all the uncertainty surrounding the safety and efficacy of vaccines, it's critical to protect your right to make independent health choices and exercise voluntary informed consent to vaccination. It is urgent that everyone in America stand up and fight to protect and expand vaccine informed consent protections in state public health and employment laws. The best way to do this is to get personally involved with your state legislators and educating the leaders in your community.

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY.

National vaccine policy recommendations are made at the federal level but vaccine laws are made at the state level. It is at the state level where your action to protect your vaccine choice rights can have the greatest impact. It is critical for EVERYONE to get involved now in standing up for the legal right to make voluntary vaccine choices in America because those choices are being threatened by lobbyists representing drug companies, medical trade associations and public health officials, who are trying to persuade legislators to strip all vaccine exemptions from public health laws.

Signing up for NVIC's free Advocacy Portal at www.NVICAdvocacy.org gives you immediate, easy access to your own state legislators on your Smart Phone or computer so you can make your voice heard. You will be kept up-to-date on the latest state bills threatening your vaccine choice rights and get practical, useful information to help you become an effective vaccine choice advocate in your own community. Also, when national vaccine issues come up, you will have the up-to-date information and call to action items you need at your fingertips… So please, as your first step, sign up for the NVIC Advocacy Portal.

Share Your Story with the Media and People You Know

If you or a family member has suffered a serious vaccine reaction, injury or death, please talk about it. If we don't share information and experiences with one another, everybody feels alone and afraid to speak up. Write a letter to the editor if you have a different perspective on a vaccine story that appears in your local newspaper. Make a call in to a radio talk show that is only presenting one side of the vaccine story. I must be frank with you; you have to be brave because you might be strongly criticized for daring to talk about the "other side" of the vaccine story. Be prepared for it and have the courage to not back down.

Only by sharing our perspective and what we know to be true about vaccination will the public conversation about vaccination open up so people are not afraid to talk about it. We cannot allow the drug companies and medical trade associations funded by drug companies or public health officials promoting forced use of a growing list of vaccines to dominate the conversation about vaccination. The vaccine injured cannot be swept under the carpet and treated like nothing more than "statistically acceptable collateral damage" of national one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination policies that put way too many people at risk for injury and death. We shouldn't be treating people like guinea pigs instead of human beings.

Internet Resources Where You Can Learn More

I encourage you to visit the website of the non-profit charity, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), at www.NVIC.org:

1. NVIC Memorial for Vaccine Victims: View descriptions and photos of children and adults, who have suffered vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths. If you or your child experiences an adverse vaccine event, please consider posting and sharing your story here.
2. If You Vaccinate, Ask 8 Questions: Learn how to recognize vaccine reaction symptoms and prevent vaccine injuries.
3. Vaccine Freedom Wall: View or post descriptions of harassment and sanctions by doctors, employers, school and health officials for making independent vaccine choices.

Connect with Your Doctor or Find a New One That Will Listen and Care

If your pediatrician or doctor refuses to provide medical care to you or your child unless you agree to get vaccines you don't want, I strongly encourage you to have the courage to find another doctor. Harassment, intimidation, and refusal of medical care is becoming the modus operandi of the medical establishment in an effort to stop the change in attitude of many parents about vaccinations after they become truly educated about health and vaccination. However, there is hope. At least 15 percent of young doctors recently polled admit that they're starting to adopt a more individualized approach to vaccinations in direct response to the vaccine safety concerns of parents.

It is good news that there is a growing number of smart young doctors, who prefer to work as partners with parents in making personalized vaccine decisions for children, including delaying vaccinations or giving children fewer vaccines on the same day or continuing to provide medical care for those families, who decline use of one or more vaccines. So take the time to locate a doctor, who treats you with compassion and respect and is willing to work with you to do what is right for your child.