(For anyone reading this in Australia, I did a similar blog in 2008, on Australian media lies on pertussis as well, which you can read here. It also contains full text medical articles and proof that what their media reports is blatantly fictitious propaganda, created by medical people whose only aim is to intentionally deceive the reader by NOT providing the facts. After all, if they provided you with the facts, they wouldn't be able to bully you into "comformity and compliance" would they?)
Nikki Macdonald
Senior feature writer
The Dominion Post and Your Weekend
04 474 0063
www.dompost.co.nz
From: Hilary Butler [mailto:butler@watchdog.net.nz]
Sent: Wednesday, 30 November 2011 5:57 p.m.
To: 'nikki.macdonald@dompost.co.nz'
Subject: Your article, "battline immunisation ignorance"
Dear Nikki,
While what follows may appear to be anger at you, it is not. It’s anger at the medical people who came to you with dogma … not with facts, and have deliberately mislead you. I will prove that to you using their own documents.
In your article "Battline Immunisation Ignorance" you stated: ****Nasty at any age, whooping cough can cause brain damage and even death in young babies. Before a vaccine was available, the disease killed more babies than measles, diphtheria, polio and scarlet fever combined.***
Exactly what was the doctor’s desired “reader’s inference” - by using this statement? This statement infers to the average reader that it was ONLY after a vaccine was available, that all these baby deaths stopped. Correct?
Yet nothing could be further from the truth, and every single doctor who talked to you, should have known better. Cameron Grant certainly knows that, because he’s worked with the same data as I have, and he’s never been able to bring himself to put in print the full death decline graph for whooping cough.. and no wonder! It makes a mockery of the comment above.
Why did Cameron Grant tell you that under 6 years, the whooping cough vaccine has an 80% effectiveness, when the only study done on the current NZ vaccine shows it has an effective immunisation rate of 33% (see korobeinikov 03 attached)? And all those toddlers under one… in Wellington hospital – how many of them are appropriately vaccinated for their age? FACT: Most babies over the age of 6 months who get whooping cough, are fully and appropriately vaccinated. Why? Because NZ has about a 94% nationwide vaccination rate for that vaccine. And you can request under the OIA vaccination rate data by region, if you want to find that out. Why is Grant’s mantra simply, “more more more and more timely”?
At least Dr Helen Harris Petoussis had the honesty to admit on Radio Rhema that the whooping cough vaccine is lousy.
They gave you a 19 year old fraudulent statistic of 60% vaccination and your next sentence was in the present tense, saying, “That leaves a whole tranche of society who are not protected.” Really? Did you ask them for the ESR data showing the vaccination status of all these whooping cough cases in that age group?
Why is he talking such low vaccination rates? In Sommerville 07 attached which Cameron Grant co-authored, the point is made that by 1996, the pertussis vaccination rates were already 86%, I know that by 2000, whooping cough vaccination rates were already 90%, and they are now around 94% and even higher in some districts.
The 2 year old rate of 60% in the 90’s was a total nonsense. Why would you think that 86% of infants, would be up to date by a year old, and suddenly, only 60% would be up-to-date by 2 years? That is straight nonsense.
Did you ask them for FACTS and proof that their numbers were accurate?
Just think. We’ve had over 90% baby vaccination rates for whooping cough vaccines for over 11 years….since 2000, AND they’ve includes even more shots since then for the adolescents at the time…, and yet more, after 2000…. AND here we are with whooping cough in EVEN higher numbers than it was before 1960? Don’t you think that’s absolutely astonishing?
Look at the more than doubling of cases in the under ones since vaccination started... Why has that doubled when the actual vaccination rates has increased radically in that age group since 1960, let along 1992, or 2000? What else might that indicate, Nikki? Have a guess?
I’m not stupid and neither are you, so surely you can work that out. Why would Dr Grant et al, not discuss this with you honestly?
Australia which has had over a 95% whooping cough vaccination rate since 2000, is having the largest outbreak in their history since pertussis vaccination started. The same is happening in USA Nikki, and their rate of vaccination is even higher than Australia. So what do you think is happening there?
The only really honest remark Cameron Grant has made, is that reducing poor nutrition would lower infectious disease rates. Improving barriers to healthcare would not, since whether or not a child gets seriously sick in the first place, is dependant on nutrition, and if your child isn’t seriously sick you don’t need access to healthcare. Furthermore, Cameron Grant has absolutely nothing to offer in the way of treatment for either whooping cough or measles. And Cameron Grant knows that bad nutrition is the disease driver, because he’s published several studies which show that the sickest children in Auckland hospitals are the most malnourished.
While some in the medical profession will tell you that a single pertussis vaccine was available in 1945, what they won’t tell you was that it hit a record high of a mere 9% uptake before it was discontinued in 1955, when it was stopped because baby vaccines were causing “provocation polio” (Bet they didn’t tell you that either…) . Why would you assume that one jab of one whooping cough vaccine in 9% of people in 1955, would make any difference if five jabs of a superior vaccine in 94% of babies today, still sees us with higher levels of whooping cough than before vaccination started in 1960?
In 1958, once the SALK polio injection was widespread, they re-introduced a three dose whooping cough schedule, but parents wouldn’t use it, so then they combined it with diphtheria and tetanus to make DPT in 1960. After that, parents were more interested.
And given that the “new improved” whooping cough vaccines they use now, which requires a primary series of 3 shots with 2 boosters = FIVE jabs…., have an actual efficacy rate of… 33%, can you imagine what the old one shot in 1945, was like?
No mention of that. You are being sold a sacred cow here Nikki, not a set of proveable facts. I have attached for you, two pdfs which include the relevant graphs – as well as all the historical infant mortality rates, since you are focusing on babies. I’ve also included a Lancet article relevant to the issue, and an interesting 1932 tidbit from the appendices to the nz parliamentary journals so that you can get a flavour of the thoughts of that time period.
The attached MOH own information, and graphs,( as well as Grant’s own article with Sommerville)… shows you that you can pretty much wipe any “influence” of a max 9% uptake of one shot of a monovalent vaccine between 1945 and 55, or from 1958 onwards. And you can see from the death decline graph from 1872 in the NZ 5 diseases attachment from the MOH data, … , which Grant always declines to publish, shows that the whooping cough vaccine had nothing to do with the reduction in whooping cough deaths. If you want to know more about whooping cough, and other disease decline in this country and the REAL contribution made by clean water, better food and sewage systems…., the only definitive book which will give you an understanding of why these diseases declined in NZ is “Challenge for Health” by Dr DF Maclean. See the attachment up there called “Historical pert deaths”? In that paragraph, Dr Maclean explains to you why whooping cough was so fatal in 1907, and why it was nothing like that even in 1964 when the book was published and the vaccine use had only just started…. Did Cameron Grant show you any of that?
The medical literature and health department graphs attached, should be self explanatory for any intelligent journalist.
And I can send you a ton more if you would like it.
The only death graph I have not included for children is polio, because it’s not worth a sniff. Out of all the diseases mentioned, the death rate from polio was so miniscule in comparison to the others, as to be unworthy of comparison with any of the other diseases mentioned. (Yet most people are under the illusion that polio caused mass mortality. Funny that.)
See the TB graph? All that death reduction even for TB, was achieved BEFORE any vaccines of any sort were offered to parents, and most of the reductions for all diseases, were achieved before antibiotics became commercially available in about 1950 as well. So what did that? It wasn’t vaccines.
BTW, there never was a vaccine for scarlet fever…. And the graph only goes to 1929, because after that it was not really considered a disease of note. Scarlet fever and it’s resulting complication, rheumatic fever - has clearly been shown in the medical literature, to be nutritionally driven, which is why you will find rheumatic fever primarily in lower socio-economic groups in NZ. All of us carry Strep A regularly but the well fed amongst us never get scarlet fever, let alone it’s complication, rheumatic fever. But the reason it’s a significant problem in the lower socio economic groups where poverty is rampant, is because good nutrition prevents rheumatic fever. And Carmeron Grant should know that as well!!!
I’m sure all the medical people came across to you as most pleasant and very caring and so emotionally persuasive! …. Therefore you felt that they couldn’t possible put you wrong….,
I’m sorry if you now find the real medical data somewhat unpalatable. That isn’t my fault. There is much more I could say, but I’ll leave the factual stuff at that.
If at any point, you wish to follow up with an article on the real data and information for the problems discussed in your article, I’d be happy to provide you with “the whole story” for you to consider.
This letter will also be sent out to anyone who asks me about your article, and I may well do a series of blogs so that parents who “drive by” know that people who chose not to vaccinate, are simply being made scapegoats because the facts are not being accurately presented by the media.
What would parents who chose not to vaccinate, gain from being ignorant?
Real ignorance would lead to the sort of pillorying which your article is designed to encourage. My sole reason for emailing you, is to give you first hand experience that actually, parents who chose not to vaccinate their children are far better educated than most of those who do vaccinated. If you go out on the street, and ask one parent who vaccinates their children, to give you with the information I have just attached, not only would they not know it exists, but they would have NO IDEA how to even find it.
Non vaccinators are deliberately portrayed as ignorant in order that those who DO vaccinate will feel “holier than thou” and, then turn around and demonise those of us who don’t. sort of reminds me of the social mentality at the time of Copernicus, don’t you think?
The real question is … exactly….. who is ignorant?
Regards,
Hilary.
