6 things I wish antivaxxers would stop saying

 

Let’s start by saying how much I love you guys. Really. We’re a ragtag group, all with different opinions, different experiences, different areas of expertise, different passions, and different ideas about how we should go about getting things done. Some of us are a little bit crazy; we know that. It’s a hard job. Many of us have vaccine injured kids and screaming from the rooftops for decades about the emperor having no clothes is enough to make anyone crazy. Many of us know in our hearts that proselytizing about vaccine damage is doing God’s work. Some of us have put politicians out of business in Texas and some of us have made it our mission to pound Richard Pan’s career into dust. We are a wonderful “small, but vocal minority.”

But I also want us to be right. I want all of you to be accurate in what you say online. And there are some things so deeply ingrained in our community that no one questions them and no one does more than a cursory Google search to bring them up and happily paste them onto social media. So please. Let’s stop saying these things.

1. THERE IS PEANUT OIL IN VACCINES

Of all of the vaccine injuries out there, I don’t think any of them elicits such know-it-all-isms as the peanut allergy. It must be so hard for peanut allergy parents to have literally everyone telling them what caused this deadly condition in their child (the peanut oil), and what they need to do to cure them (feed them small amounts of peanut flour). No one does that for asthma or epilepsy.

Here’s what happens when I point out the fact that there is no evidence of peanut oil in today’s vaccines:

First comes the 1964 peanut oil adjuvant New York Times article. But I want you to think for a second– the peanut allergy epidemic began with children born in the late 1980s to very early 1990s. Do you think manufacturers held onto this safe and effective peanut oil adjuvant for 25 years before adding it to children’s vaccines? No, they did not. It had a short life, discussed below, but that does not mean it’s in today’s American pediatric vaccines.

Then comes the vaccine patents. Oh, patents. If you’ve never written a patent then you probably don’t understand that the goal of a patent is to keep your product as vague and unreplicable as possible, while being only specific enough to gain patent protection. Patents are not a recipe for how to make a product. They are a kitchen sink approach to making a product. See the difference? They list every kind of adjuvant possible– including a water-in-oil peanut adjuvant– so that no one has any idea which adjuvant on that list they really used. This does not mean peanut oil is in vaccines.

Then someone lobs the “generally recognized as safe” status of highly refined peanut oil into the discussion, with the claim that manufacturers would not have to disclose peanut oil if they put it into vaccines. Highly refined peanut oil shouldn’t ever contain any peanut protein, and I don’t personally know any peanut allergic kids who have ever reacted to highly refined peanut oil. In fact, I know many peanut allergic kids who eat at Chick-fil-A. But just because there is an oil that doesn’t need to be disclosed by law does not mean that oil is in vaccines, and if peanut oil were used as an adjuvant it wouldn’t be GRAS, because GRAS ingredients can only be “non-bioactive,” which means they can’t have a biological effect. An adjuvant is certainly bioactive.

Besides, GRAS applies to food and food packaging. It not longer applies to drugs, and hasn’t for 56 years.

I know that there is also a powdered peanut broth for growing gram negative bacteria, but vaccines list their growth media and this broth is not listed. Peanut broth would not have GRAS status and you’d being seeing it on the excipient list. Yes, I know that Dr. Palevsky wrote a piece about this where he furthered the peanut oil/peanut growth medium rumor. This isn’t his area of expertise and I’m going to let it slide, but someone please ask him to stop saying that.

Then comes the 2011 Tim O’Shea plagiarized piece where he bastardizes Heather Fraser’s work about the history of peanuts in America. I’m sure Dr. O’Shea is a very nice human being but I have no tolerance for anyone who steals the work of another, takes credit, and then to add insult to injury, contorts facts to make it conclude something the original author never concluded.

Heather Fraser’s book has a short discussion of the history of peanut oil in the flu shot (1960s-1970s) and the penicillin shot (1950-1980). And I’ll tell you, people have taken these facts and twisted them into what they are not so badly that she almost wishes she’d never brought them up. You have to read her whole book. Don’t skim it for some self-affirming information.

Heather Fraser is a leading historian on peanut use in America. She is a friend of mine and we talk on the phone about this issue every so often. In fact, she just wrote a piece about it for World Mercury Project so that you can helpfully paste a link each time you see someone say that there is peanut oil in vaccines.

To quote Heather, “Again, we did not suddenly add fish or nuts, dairy, eggs, banana, wheat, latex, bee venom, pollens, etc. to the vaccines to launch this allergy epidemic. Rather, we suddenly changed the potency and number of vaccines we gave to our children starting at birth to create atopic and at risk children.”

2. A SHATTERED MULTI-DOSE FLU VACCINE VIAL REQUIRES A BUILDING EVACUATION

I love your work, RFK, Jr., but when you said this one year ago to Tucker Carlson on FOX News (at 2:48) it was inaccurate. I did think it was a brilliant line, though! Until I looked it up.

A broken multi-dose flu vaccine is biohazardous waste like blood and body fluids. County health departments call for it to be cleaned up and put into a thick orange or red trash bag with the biohazard symbol on it.

No building is evacuated.

It is also not a “HAZMAT” team cleanup. HAZWOPER personnel are trained and certified to assess spills, clean up spills within their capacity, or make the decision to elevate the situation to a HAZMAT level. A HAZMAT team is not called for a broken flu vaccine. It just goes in a red bag. No one is wearing a HAZMAT suit.

There was a story in 2009 about a broken mercury thermometer at a flu shot clinic that caused an evacuation, and another in 2017 at a Malaysian hospital. But neither was a flu vaccine.

To put it in perspective, a flu vaccine contains 25 micrograms of mercury and a new vial contains 125. A mercury filling in a tooth can off-gas that much mercury fume in two to four weeks. A CFL lightbulb has 4,000 micrograms of mercury, so you can see why breaking one is a really big deal. And an old-fashioned thermometer has over 600,000 micrograms of mercury– you’d be crazy not clear the building if you break one.

3. THERE IS ALUMINUM IN THE FLU VACCINE

Aluminum is an adjuvant that tricks the body into having a massive immune response to a tiny bit of antigen. While the multi-dose vials of influenza vaccine contain a kind of mercury preservative, they do not, and have never, contained aluminum.

There is no flu vaccine on the American market that has approval for aluminum adjuvant. There is one single H5N1 flu vaccine that is kept in a national stockpile that contains an adjuvant called AS03, which is squalene-based, or shark liver oil. It is not available for purchase in the US at this time. A second squalene-based flu vaccine called Fluad is available for senior citizens.

4. VACCINE MANUFACTURERS REPLACED MERCURY WITH ALUMINUM

Mercury is used as a cytotoxic preservative to stop bacteria and fungi from growing in vaccine vials. It was phased out of American pediatric vaccines, for the most part, in 2001-2003, except for trace amounts. It is not phased out worldwide, and it is still in the American flu vaccine that comes in a large vial with five doses.

Aluminum, on the other hand, is an adjuvant to make the vaccine elicit a big immune response. One metal didn’t replace the other. Aluminum has been in vaccines since the very first diphtheria vaccine came on the market in the 1930s. Prior to 2001, many vaccines contained both aluminum and mercury.

5. THE PRE-2001 MMR HAD MERCURY

The live MMR, varicella, and shingles are frozen vaccines. They are preserved with cold and do not have other preservative, so they must be kept very cold during their entire chain of custody. They never had mercury preservative, didn’t have mercury removed, and don’t contain mercury or aluminum now.

In 1963 there was an inactivated measles vaccine to compete with the live vaccine, but its antibody level wasn’t high enough and it was pulled from the market. No one under the age of 53 today would have received that vaccine in a field trial.

6. THE WHOOPING COUGH VACCINE SHEDS

The pertussis vaccine does not shed. However, it doesn’t stop a pertussis infection from forming at some later date either, which is then contagious, but that isn’t what shedding is. Getting a pertussis vaccine doesn’t create a low level pertussis infection that sheds to other people.

When you see the studies about DPT/DTaP/Tdap-vaccinated children developing near-symptomless pertussis, it wasn’t in the days after vaccination, as if the vaccine caused pertussis. They developed mild coughs probably within a year of being vaccinated and the parents didn’t realize it was whooping cough. The DtaP/Tdap isn’t a live vaccine, and only the live vaccines have the potential to shed.

There are currently six live vaccines (measles, mumps, rubella, rotavirus, chickenpox, shingles) used in the US but there used to be eight (including oral polio and nasal influenza).

This is shedding: getting a Flumist vaccine up the nose, which must create a low level flu infection in the respiratory tract, which would shed for a week or so. That nasal vaccine was unrecommended, and now I think it’s re-recommended again, but I don’t know that it’s actually available.

This is also shedding: the oral Rotavirus vaccine passes through the intestinal tract and sheds in baby bowel movements. The oral polio vaccine that we don’t use in the US since about 1997 also sheds in bowel movements.

Getting the live vaccines MMR, chicken pox, or shingles has the possibility of shedding, and we’ve all seen the old warnings in cancer wards to keep freshly vaccinated MMR or chickenpox kids out of the area. Although it’s all been scrubbed from the internet now, Livestrong still has a reference to the National Cancer Institute saying it.

Think of it this way:

Shedding is when the vaccine creates the infection.

Asymptomatic carrier is when the vaccine didn’t prevent an infection from happening.

I think those are my biggest complaints. Are we still friends? I hope so. Now go do some accurate, vocal dissenting about the government vaccination program.

BONUS GRIEVANCE BROUGHT TO YOU BY DR. SHERRI TENPENNY

7. VACCINES ARE INJECTED INTO THE BLOODSTREAM

Now, this might sound nitpicky, but it’s something that trolls will call you out on every time you say it. There is no IV needle inserted into a vein, delivering a vaccine. The nurse is aiming away from being anywhere near a vein, I guarantee you.

So let’s change our language about this. Vaccines are delivered four ways: orally, intradermally, subcutaneously, and intramuscularly. Five if you count the nasal flu vaccine.

In the US, the only oral vaccine is for infant rotavirus, so you know that one isn’t injected into the bloodstream, or into a vein.

No vaccines in the US are delivered intradermally, but in other countries the BCG vaccine is administered this way with a 10mm needle. This is injected directly into the skin, and then you see that nasty reaction to it on the child’s arm for the next year. You know what I’m talking about.

Only a few American vaccines, like for pneumococcal, are injected into the subcutaneous layer of the skin with a 16mm needle. These injections go just beneath the skin into the subcutaneous fat.

Almost all vaccines are delivered intramuscularly (into a muscle) with a 25mm needle. This is because deep intramuscular injections are absorbed by the body better than subcutaneously– this is why epinephrine pens must go deep into the thigh muscle for a child in anaphylaxis.

Then where does the injected substance go? From the muscles the injected substance goes to the capillary beds, where it is picked up by the veins, and yes, it then ends up in the bloodstream.