BBC news coverage on Dr. Peter Aaby’s research obfuscates findings on the double-edged sword of vaccine non-specific effects
A September 2020 BBC news article entitled The Mystery of Why Some Vaccines are Doubly Beneficial reports on the beneficial non-specific effects of live viral vaccines in training the innate immune system and its subsequent beneficial effect on all-cause mortality but fails to fully address the double-edged sword of these effects (e.g. that inactivated, non-live vaccines have the opposite effect despite efficacy against the targeted diseases). The article links to references that elaborate on a more honest and nuanced understanding of their research teams’ full findings, but fails to openly report on them. Surprisingly, the BBC article does acknowledge that contrary to Mina et al’s findings and conclusions exclusively covered by major U.S. media outlets in recent years claiming long-term immune suppression after measles infection, that the cumulative body of research actually shows the opposite — that as with measles vaccination those who survive a measles infection have better long-term survival prospects than those who were never infected.
“In fact, it’s not just vaccines which seem to be able to do this — those who have been naturally infected by pathogens like measles, and lived, have better long-term survival prospects than those who were never infected. It’s not entirely clear why this is, but again, it’s thought to be down to the immune training the body receives, which helps it to fight off other diseases.” ~ BBC News
Dr. Peter Aaby’s research has additionally found that even subclinical and mild wild type breakthrough measles infections in low-income countries among vaccinated populations have reduced all-cause mortality compared to those who were never infected with interesting, potentially complicating and counterintuitive implications for targeted public health vs all-cause public health considerations for ‘the common good.’ While the BBC news article shares helpful information on both live viral vaccine and wild-type infection non-specific benefits, it fails to distinguish between how these results apply to low vs high-income countries. While the studies showing benefits of live viral vaccines against all-cause mortality provided it is the last vaccine-type received apply to low-income countries with far higher measles IFR than high-income countries (as much as 1,000 times higher) and higher all-cause infant mortality rates, the broad overall beneficial effect on the immune system has been shown to have non-specific benefits against hospitalization due to non-targeted diseases in high-income countries provided it is the last vaccine-type received without simultaneous or subsequent administration of an inactivated vaccine. By comparison to low-income countries historically at the time the vaccine was introduced the targeted benefit against acute measles IFR was 1 in 10,000, presumably with adjusted risks that were lower if the child was breast fed during the more vulnerable periods in infancy, was not otherwise clinically vulnerable and as the world has known since at least the 1990s, properly treated with high-dose water-based Vit A. In countries with high income disparities within their population, both the targeted and beneficial non-specific effects of measles vaccination as well as the acute risk and non-specific benefits of measles infection are highly dependent on income.
The BBC article acknowledges that this non-specific benefit from immune system training is negated when a non-live vaccine is given simultaneously or subsequent to the live viral vaccine; however, they generally frame this as a neutral finding and fail to probe or report on the underlying mechanisms given Dr. Peter Aaby’s additional findings on the overall non-specific detrimental immune-dysregulating effects of non-live/inactivated vaccines. Although he gave a presentation on the dual nature of these findings based on timing, order and vaccine type received at a scientific symposium at the Institute for Scientific Freedom in 2019, that video has since been made unavailable and has been removed from YouTube. Taken together, both the BBC and YouTube as well as other media sources are a part of a conglomerate of news organizations called The Trusted News Initiative committed to fighting misinformation and disinformation, including vaccine disinformation. However, in obfuscating the full dataset, research and implications of his findings in their own news coverage and censoring a presentation of his scientific findings in his own words, they have succeeded in distorting the full picture of the double-edged sword of vaccine non-specific effects — both the beneficial and detrimental — from public view.
Thankfully, the Institute for Scientific Freedom founded by a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, in addition to their own expert review on the DTP vaccine has uploaded and made available Dr. Peter Aaby’s presentation on his full research findings. Likewise, his spouse and research partner Dr. Christine Benn’s TedTalk presentation remains available for viewing, perhaps because she frames her talk with a hopeful message — that the detrimental effects of non-live vaccines can be corrected and if given in the optimal order can potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives, particularly in low-income countries.
Dr. Christine Benn is the founder of the Optimmunize Conference which featured opening remarks by the Director-General of the WHO at their 2022 symposium and a keynote presentation by Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the “grandfather of vaccines,” who in emphasizing the non-specific benefits of live viral vaccines specifically concluded that “there was no doubt that non-specific effects of vaccines are a real phenomenon of extreme importance that needs to be explored much further.” [Complicating the issue, however, in contrast to most results indicating non-specific all-cause mortality benefit, the use of OPV in some low-income countries has not always been more beneficial than not and reports in the scientific literature (e.g. India) are not necessarily ‘very rare.’ Whether this was due to improper storage and handling, lack of good sewage disposal systems, underlying malnutrition or immunodeficiencies leading to mutations, or some other factor like heavy DDT use in India linked historically to giving a variety of enteroviruses greater access to the nervous system (a hypothesis), this also needs to be acknowledged and accounted for. So too does the possibility as reported in an investigative article in the Washington Post in 1992 that the process of manufacturing OPV in monkey kidneys might have been linked to the origin of the AIDS epidemic.] The generally beneficial off-target effects of OPV, however, presuming a clean manufacturing and distribution process are not just applicable to low-income countries. As vaccine-derived polio spread in U.S. communities amongst the immunized and unimmunized alike, silently boosting, silently correcting dysregulated immune systems everywhere including from the IPV vaccine itself, for a positive net benefit potentially even against Covid-19, one case of paralysis in an unimmunized young person at quite possibly the same rate as one would expect from the OPV when it was still available on the U.S market through 1999 (a few cases per million) was treated as a “public health emergency” worthy of national news attention. Meanwhile, the story of one case of paralysis +40 other symptoms in a clinical trial for a novel product at a rate of ~ 1 in 1,100 children was functionally buried, indicating what a powerful influence media is in framing and directing the public’s attention towards or away from a particular narrative. Dr. Christine Benn has stated in a separate interview on the overall topic of her research team’s findings, both the beneficial and detrimental—
“There are large, strong powers out there who don’t really want to hear about [non-specific effects] but basically to me they’re good news. It means that we could optimize the use of vaccines to be not only a strong protective effect against vaccine diseases as we know them, but we can also optimize their use in terms of overall health. And we can do that by just intelligently designing vaccine programs which take non-specific effects into account by making sure that children have live vaccines to a large extent, and also making sure that live vaccines are the most recent vaccine.”
Failure to acknowledge these off-target effects, both the beneficial and the detrimental and their implications for developing immune systems, however, can also be equally devasting as their research group for the past 40 years has also shown. In Dr. Benn’s TedTalk on the uncomfortable yet hopeful findings if adequately and responsively addressed, “may have implications for other types of diseases, more chronic diseases which depend on the immune system, such as asthma and allergies, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, cardiac diseases and even some types of cancers.” Relatedly, a recent long form political candidacy speech addressing many of these very same health concerns in children from the perspective of both improving public health and protecting the environment as they are inextricably and intimately linked continues to be heavily censored from mainstream audiences despite the somewhat unexpected finding that at least 1 in7 and as many as 1 in 5 Democrats support the candidate.
Beyond the off-target effects on the immune system itself, animal studies have shown that early life immune activation events effect brain development. Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Lurie Center for Autism researchers write in a study published in 2019:
“Our findings suggest that immune system activation during critical periods of development is sufficient to produce persistent alterations in behavior and brain biology — even in the absence of accompanying genetic vulnerability or injury.”
Specifically, other research has shown that the same beneficial and detrimental effects of live vs non-live vaccines on the immune system effect brain development in both beneficial and detrimental off-target ways, confirmed by an unpublished CDC study on HepB vaccine in infants obtained via FOIA request among other analyses obtained and further acknowledged as a risk factor for ASD by Harvard researchers. As Dr. Temple Grandin explains in an interview regarding early life vaccinations albeit in a less differentiated and more generalized way, “The thing is (with susceptible children) to delay the vaccines…The immune system and the nervous system come out of the same embryonic tissue and so you’ve got to let that mature.” Nonetheless, parental concerns and reports of injuries whether reported on social media or diagnosed by Harvard and Oxford trained pediatric neurologists, whether quietly compensated in the NVICP or ruled on in the courts, whether reported by celebrities or every day people, continue to be highly stigmatized and censored.
According to Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, former IOM member, the director of research at Johns Hopkins Kennedy Krieger Institute for 20 years, the Director of Clinical Trials at Lurie’s Center for Autism at Mass General Hospital and volunteer teaching staff at Harvard Medical School, foremost expert in his field who served as the U.S. government’s expert witness in the autism omnibus proceedings (AOP) in 2009 after which our scientific institutions determined the issue to be scientifically closed, HHS inappropriately used his expert testimony in one test case where he opined against causation as reason to toss out 5,000 cases who never had their day in court while simultaneously burying another expert opinion in a test case where he concluded that causation was determined. “In my opinion,” he writes, what the Department of Justice did “was highly misleading.” In a testimony under oath for the Yates-Hazlehurst case he explains regarding the general state of research and treatment carried out at his clinic(s) over the years that, “I think we are in a new era when a lot of research is being done now that helps us to understand the underlying metabolic basis of autism, and I think this is going to change our approach to the problem. It hasn’t reached the epidemiological level at this point. We are in the midst of active research in this area…Once we have the biomarkers for the patients who have susceptibility of regression following immunizations, it will change our approach to treatment of the children, to identify the children who are at risk. I think it will change the treatment, but more importantly I think it will prevent the development of autism in quite a few children. Currently about 30 percent of children with autism undergo regression, and we would like very much to understand the metabolic basis for that and how we can prevent it.” Dr. Richard Kelley, the director of research of the metabolism division at Kennedy Krieger Institute and professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins has also testified under oath in court cases regarding causality, stating that contrary to statements made by the CDC, up to 40% of the autistic children they work with regularly at their clinic at Johns Hopkins regress after an inflammatory event including vaccinations due to underlying metabolic issues. When asked to testify under oath about the position of the CDC on this issue he stated, “I agree with their position as a public health measure. I don’t agree with it scientifically.” And with regards to how his opinion contrasts with that of the CDC, “It is contrary to their conclusion. It is not contrary to their data.” These scientists and their colleagues, among many others, despite media coverage which frames such opinions ad nauseum as being on the fringes of social and scientific reality, are actually in good company. A survey of 30,000 people across 38 different countries indicates that nearly 6 in 10 people globally say they are either unsure or believe that there is a link. Specifically in India, the world’s most populous country, 44% believe vaccinations are linked to autism and 36% aren’t sure (80%), while only 20% believe there is no link. Put another way, the majority of the world’s population doesn’t trust the pronouncements of certainty and scientific closure on the subject as put forth officially by public health agencies. If you feel certain that there is no link and all of this is news to you, sorry to burst your bubble but socially speaking you are holding a minority view. If you’re a physician/scientist and you’re doubly certain, I would argue that the world is ahead of you. Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former Director of the NIH and IOM member herself expressed deep frustration with her fellow IOM members in their decision not to pursue research into at-risk susceptibility groups as she was adamant that the question had not been answered. More recently, even Dr. Christine Benn has publicly expressed concern that some of the world’s leading experts in aluminum toxicology have faced censorship and cuts to funding for further research to investigate the potential link between aluminum, the immune-activating/dysregulating component of most inactivated vaccines, and ASD.
Dr. Zahorodny, ASD prevalence researcher and principal investigator for CDC’s national ADDM survey for New Jersey appears to have given a head nod to patient safety advocates when in 2018 he teamed up with decades-long safety advocate, father to a vaccine-injured child Mark Blaxill, co-author of the book Denial and chairman of the Canary Party dedicated to advocating for those harmed by the medical industry to publish an independent study looking at the increasing autism prevalence rates in the state of California; and again, one year later when he met and interviewed with the director of Safe Minds, an organization that historically and currently has largely focused on the vaccine safety issue as well as other environmental contributing factors since its inception to discuss the findings of his 2019 CDC ASD prevalence study. In the interview he noted (long form) that the rate of autism has increased 150–200% since 2000, that this increase has been driven by increases along the entire spectrum of disability, but especially by so-called severe autism, that evidence shows this increase has not been driven by increased awareness or changing diagnostic criteria and that the adjusted prevalence for boys when considering CDC’s changing methodologies across sites is in his estimation reaching 4.5% nationally (1 in 22) with an underestimation in minority children. His most recent 2021 study found still rising prevalence rates, in some regions as high as 7% (1 in 14), with an adjusted rate presumably even higher in boys. Zahorodny lamented in his interview with Safe Minds the lack of urgency within the CDC and the media with regards to the rising rates which are still largely underestimated, and urgently called for the need to identify and study non-genetic environmental factors and triggers. Given that the rise in autism prevalence is significantly driven by increased rates in those with substantial, severe impairment, Dr. Zahorodny describes the trend as “consistent, broad and startling,” which he further describes as “a public health crisis.” Indeed, according to Colombia University’s School of Public Health, deaths in individuals with autism increased 700 percent in the past 16 years. Autistic children are 40 times more likely to die from unintentional injuries than their non-disabled peers, 3 times more likely to die from unintentional injuries over the age of 14 and are 160 times more likely to die from drowning. Given that unintentional injury is the number one cause of death in young people annually, surpassing all infectious disease mortality combined for their age group, including Covid, this is truly a concerning trend, and increasing rates have shown no signs of plateauing. The only U.S. counties with documented decreasing trends amidst ever-increasing background rates are among wealthy whites. As a March 2020 study of trends in the state of California summarizes, “In the wealthiest areas of California, including Santa Clara County in the Silicon Valley and the coastal counties extending from Monterey through San Francisco and north to Marin and Sonoma, white ASD prevalence trends show a striking change around birth year 2000. Following years of steady increases in prevalence in the 1990s, which are similar across all California counties, ASD prevalence among whites and Asians in these wealthy counties flattened and, for whites, actually decreased over birth year 2000–2013.” Amidst surging increases in all other populations, shouldn’t the public be interested to know what these parents started doing differently?
While glossing over the other side of the double-edged sword of vaccine non-specific effects, quoting Dr. Peter Aaby only on the beneficial non-specific effects on the immune system of live viral vaccines and censoring his own work from YouTube regarding the deleterious non-specific effects of inactivated ones, the BBC article of the Trusted News Initiative concludes, “While the anti-vaccine movement has been falsely stirring up suspicion against vaccines for decades, it seems that ironically, the only secret vaccines have been hiding is that they’re better for us than anyone ever imagined.” Ironic, truly — given that his research findings are decidedly and unequivocally broader than that and have important implications that urgently need to be addressed for any number of childhood vaccination schedules globally. While Denmark, home to Dr. Peter Aaby and Dr. Christine Benn’s research group already have a more optimal childhood vaccine schedule in their country, with regards to optimizing non-specific benefits and minimizing harms they could improve further according to their research by switching out IPV with OPV, switching the order of the last dose of DTaP with the second dose of MMR for the beneficial non-specific effects to last throughout childhood (and life) and dropping the HPV vaccine altogether or using it cautiously in a more targeted way for high-risk groups. In the U.S. as Dr. Peter Aaby’s research has already shown, and as confirmed by CDC’s own study, no child utilizing the U.S. vaccine schedule as it is currently formulated is deriving the non-specific benefits of live viral vaccines, including MMR.
As a whole the schedule is increasingly biased towards inactivated ones including annual inactivated influenza vaccines with comparable effects on the immune system in children. That might be why parents (especially Somalis) might be more inclined to believe CDC whistleblowers in line with their own experience than studies out of Denmark with alternative, pared down schedules that excluded 1st and 2nd generation immigrants (Somalis) from their analysis, even when journalists used non-representative faces that look like them to represent the results of the study on the cover of the New York Times. “We can read the science ourselves,” Abdulkadir Osman Hassan says of his son who developed seizures within minutes of receiving his (mostly inactivated) 18-month vaccines. “The media insults us by claiming we were misled and that we don’t know what we saw with our own eyes.” Maybe it’s time we get ahead of the forces behind curated media messaging and do something to change that. It’s been long over due for quite some time now. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) whose reviews the CDC frequently cites as a reference for evidence of safety for the entirety of their schedule writes in their “Committee on the Assessment of Studies of Health Outcomes Related to the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice” published a decade ago in March 2013—
“To date, there have been few comparative studies evaluating the safety of different vaccine schedules. A few of the existing studies have shown that there are cases in which the risk of adverse events can depend on the vaccination schedule used. Hence, it is both a feasible and an important area of study. As a relatively new field of investigation, the big question is what types of study designs will be most fruitful for evaluating different childhood vaccine schedules.”
A 2013 IOM review of stakeholder concerns concludes—
“The committee’s literature searches and review were intended to identify health outcomes associated with some aspect of the childhood immunization schedule. Allergy and asthma, autoimmunity, autism, other neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., learning disabilities, tics, behavioral disorders, and intellectual disabilities), seizures, and epilepsy were included as search terms. Furthermore, the committee reviewed papers on immunization and premature infants.
In summary, few studies have comprehensively assessed the association between the entire immunization schedule or variations in the overall schedule and categories of health outcomes, and no study has directly examined health outcomes and stakeholder concerns in precisely the way that the committee was charged to address in its statement of task. No studies have compared the differences in health outcomes that some stakeholders questioned between entirely unimmunized populations of children and fully immunized children. Experts who addressed the committee pointed not to a body of evidence that had been overlooked but rather to the fact that existing research has not been designed to test the entire immunization schedule.”
Yet physicians recommending alternative schedules who take CDC FOIA data and whistleblower testimony and other research into account, (avoiding maternal immune activation (MIA) in pregnancy, no hep B at birth, alum containing vaccines given one at a time, delayed MMR given without the administration of other vaccines during the same visit, no acetaminophen use, guidance to avoid other environmental toxins, screening out susceptible patients and/or vaccinating with caution), who have followed the guidance of former NIH directors and IOM members, Harvard and Johns Hopkins researchers and the government’s own expert witness to pursue susceptibility groups, and who have published outcomes from their patient population predictably consistent with Dr. Peter Aaby’s research into vaccine non-specific effects have been severely persecuted for it (see discussion section). Further, despite recommending vaccines and administering them regularly they are falsely described in the press as ‘anti-vaccine,’ as if any deviation from the official CDC recommended schedule is ‘anti-science.’ Besides the inherently slanderous, divisive and dehumanizing connotations, the ease and frank stupidity with which these labels are routinely used to ruin careers and stigmatize any kind of scientific debate as if there are no possible improvements to be made is difficult to watch. No matter that despite recommending a schedule that has not yet been fully “optimmunized” according to Dr. Peter Aaby and Dr. Christine Benn et al’s work, Integrative Pediatrics still reports remarkably better health outcomes in their patient population than the rest of the U.S. population, something at least worth studying to figure out what they’re doing right given the gaps in research outlined by the IOM, while incidence rates continue to skyrocket nearly everywhere else. The press can keep throwing labels around that obfuscate reality all they want, but at the end of the day it continues to be done at the public’s own expense.
A 2017 Interview with Dr. Paul Thomas, founder of Integrative Pediatrics—
https://www.doctorsandscience.com/uploads/1/3/5/8/135856265/tributaries2-12-2017drpaulweb.mp3
