Once blamed on unvaccinated children, few today deny the fact that fully vaccinated children are spreading whooping cough as outbreaks continue across the U.S.

One of the latest outbreaks has occurred in North Carolina, where Carteret County health officials have warned parents to be on the lookout for whooping cough.

Kim Davis, the Nursing Director for the Carteret County Health Department, was interviewed by WITN and readily admitted that all the cases have been in fully vaccinated children, and that the vaccine does not offer protection:

Every case that we’ve had, that we’ve seen so far, has been vaccinated. So you can’t take for granted that just because your child’s been vaccinated for pertussis that they don’t have the capability of contracting it.1

The pertussis vaccine is supposed to protect against whooping cough, and even though health officials now acknowledge that the vaccine is not effective, it is still required.

Stacia Strong of WITN in North Carolina reports:

Health Department officials also tell us that it is required for children to get vaccinated for pertussis… 1

When one of the modern, post-pertussis vaccine outbreaks of whooping cough occurred in Los Angeles in 2010, there appeared to be a healthy debate in academia and the media about the cause of this whooping cough outbreak.

In a PBS News Hour broadcast titled Whooping Cough Returns to California After Decades of Decline in March of 2011, reporter Joanne Faryon of KPBS in San Diego interviewed “two of the world’s leading whooping cough experts” who had differing opinions about why whooping cough was returning among “highly vaccinated communities around the world.”

Dr. James Cherry of UCLA stated that it was due mainly to “increased awareness” while Dr. Frits Mooi of The Netherlands Center for Infectious Diseases Control stated:

We found really a kind of new mutation in the bug.2

Dr. Cherry also stated that:

…the increase is also due in part because of something called waning immunity. Immunity to whooping cough does not last a lifetime.2

What neither scientist stated, however, was that the cause of this new whooping cough outbreak was due to the small percentage of the population not vaccinated with the pertussis vaccine. The debate was on the effectiveness or non-effectiveness of the vaccine.

2013: Time to Blame the Unvaccinated for Whooping Cough Outbreaks

All of that changed in 2013, however.

Perhaps faced with the pressure to remove the failing pertussis vaccine from the CDC childhood vaccine schedule, which is only available as a combo vaccine together with diphtheria and tetanus (DTaP), and is administered in a 5-dose series at 2, 4, 6, and 15–18 months and 4–6 years old, representing many millions of dollars in revenue, the small percentage of the population not vaccinated with pertussis was targeted as a cause of whooping cough outbreaks.

Several studies concerning the pertussis vaccine and whooping cough outbreaks were published in 2013 and the following years addressing the problem, and one of those studies, widely published and circulated in the corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media, blamed the outbreaks on unvaccinated children, in spite of all the evidence that linked the outbreaks to a failed vaccine.

An article published in the Los Angeles Times by reporter Mary Macvean on October 5, 2013, represents what the corporate-sponsored media was now reporting as to the cause of the 2010 Los Angeles whooping cough outbreak.

The title of the article was Unvaccinated children helped fuel whooping cough outbreak, data show.

Some excerpts from the article:

Children who did not get vaccinated against whooping cough contributed to the 2010 outbreak of the illness, when more cases were reported than in any year since 1947, researchers say. Researchers who looked at the geography of the cases suggest that clusters of “nonmedical exemptions” to immunizations were one of several factors in the California outbreak. They reported their findings Monday in the journal Pediatrics. The researchers from several institutions, including Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the California Department of Public Health, found 39 clusters with high rates of non-immunization and two clusters of pertussis among children entering kindergarten from 2005 through 2010. More cases occurred within the non-immunized clusters than outside of them, the scientists said. From 2000 to 2010, California’s “nonmedical exemption” rates more than tripled, to 2.33%, with some schools reporting rates as high as 84%, the researchers said. Both those clusters and the high pertussis clusters “were associated with factors characteristic of high socioeconomic status such as lower population density, lower average family size, lower percentage of racial or ethnic minorities,” higher incomes and other factors, the researchers wrote. It is estimated, they wrote, that more than 95% of the population must be immunized to prevent outbreaks. (emphasis added)3

The “researchers” of this study played with the statistics to find a small percentage of increase in a very small population subset to justify their conclusions that unvaccinated children were at least partially to blame for the whooping cough outbreak in Los Angeles.

The statement that is the key here to justifying a reason to increase vaccination rates for an ineffective pertussis vaccine is the statement: “It is estimated, they wrote, that more than 95% of the population must be immunized to prevent outbreaks.”

Besides the fact that the theory of “herd immunity” lacks scientific basis, government vaccine proponents, using their own published guidelines, have stated that herd immunity for whooping cough requires only 90% vaccination rates—not 95%.

90% is what is published in the Department of Health and Human Services Healthy People 2020 National Immunization Goals, for example.

Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-Founder and President of the National Vaccine Information Center, in her article Recently Vaccinated Kids Are Spreading Pertussis Everywhere, explained how the CDC’s own numbers show that the concept of “Herd Immunity” in regards to whooping cough is a myth:

The CDC now quietly admits on its website that “the bacteria that cause pertussis are always changing at the genetic level” and there is “waning immunity” from the vaccine and that ”an increase in reported pertussis cases began to rise in the U.S. in the 1980’s, when more than 94% of kindergarten children had received 4 to 5 whole cell pertussis-containing DPT shots. Today, 94% to 98% of kindergarteners have 4 to 5 acellular pertussis-containing DTaP shots, plus 88% of children aged 13 to 17 years have gotten an additional Tdap booster shot.4

The Pediatrics study in 2013 apparently just arbitrarily increased that rate to 95% to justify vaccinating children with a failed vaccine, because over 90% of the children in the U.S. had already been vaccinated with the pertussis vaccine.

Note that the 2013 Pediatrics study did not deny that the vaccine had lost its effectiveness. From the same LA Times article quoted above:

An earlier study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) vaccine loses some effectiveness after the fifth of the five recommended doses. That, too, was part of the reason for the outbreak, the Pediatrics scientists say. They also list the cyclical nature of pertussis and improved diagnosis as reasons for the high numbers.3

Nevertheless, the corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media began running stories blaming unvaccinated children for the whooping cough outbreaks.

In 2018 Virtually Nobody is Blaming the Unvaccinated Anymore: Failure of the Pertussis Vaccine Universally Accepted World-wide as Vaccinated Population Spreads Whooping Cough

Fortunately, for those who took the time to ignore the corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media spin starting in 2013, blaming the small unvaccinated population for whooping cough outbreaks, there were plenty of other studies being published clearly showing that the pertussis vaccine was a failure.

As more and more studies were published, many of them outside the U.S., it became obvious that not only was the vaccine a failure, but there is strong evidence that modern day whooping cough outbreaks are actually caused by the pertussis vaccine itself.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013 showed that pertussis was developing immunity against the current pertussis vaccine. A researcher from the CDC participated in the study:

Researchers in other countries have found evidence that circulating strains of Bordetella pertussis have adapted to the acellular vaccine, and researchers today reported similar findings for the first time in U.S. kids, based on genetic analysis of isolates from hospitalized children. Infectious disease experts have been eyeing waning immunity from acellular pertussis vaccines as a contributor to increasing numbers of cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in several countries, and evidence is mounting that another factor fueling the outbreaks could be that the bacteria are adapting to the vaccine.5

A study published in Australia in 2015 linked the ineffectiveness of the pertussis vaccine to changes made in the vaccine in 1991.

The older pertussis vaccine prior to this time, known as acellular pertussis vaccine, was notorious for its serious adverse effects, including encephalitis (often diagnosed as “autism”) and death.

Barbara Loe Fisher writes that when the federal vaccine injury compensation program was enacted into law in 1986, giving pharmaceutical companies legal immunity to injuries and deaths caused by vaccines, the largest amount of compensations awarded in the new “vaccine court” in the following years were for the pertussis vaccine:

Congress created the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) in 1986 as a social contract between government and parents, who are required under state vaccine laws to give their children federally recommended vaccines in order to attend school. I remember walking the halls of Congress in 1982 with other young parents of DPT vaccine injured children asking for a congressional investigation into the safety of the old whole cell pertussis vaccine. We did not understand why federal health agencies had not required drug companies to make that crude vaccine less toxic. We wanted to know why our babies did not have access to the less reactive new split cell pertussis vaccine in the DTaP shot that Japan was giving their children using technology developed in the 1970’s. Children who become brain damaged after receiving pertussis-containing vaccines … are especially being targeted in a blatant effort to rewrite history and cover up vaccine risks and failures. Perhaps that is because, among the $3 billion dollars in federal vaccine injury compensation awarded over the past 27 years under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, the majority of awards for children have been for pertussis-containing vaccine injuries and deaths.

The newer pertussis vaccine is now universally seen as ineffective, and there are some studies pointing to a link between whooping cough outbreaks and pertussis mutations adapting to the current vaccine, as researchers admit a new vaccine is needed.

For more information, see:

See also Dr. Viera Scheibner’s (PhD) excellent historical review of the pertussis vaccine, showing clearly that the pertussis vaccine was never responsible for “eradicating whooping cough”: Pertussis Vaccine Failure is not Just Modern but Historical: Vaccine has Never Been Effective

Should We Return to the Older Pertussis Vaccine?

Some DPT vaccine developers/defenders like Paul Offit are calling for whole cell DPT to be brought back for infants because, they say, DPT has a superior record of effectiveness and the alleged cases of DPT encephalopathy were bogus anyway.

In other words, the switch to acellular should never have been made.

In answer to this claim, Barbara Loe Fisher states: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Fisher told Health Impact News:

Whole cell pertussis vaccine in DPT was not only the most reactive vaccine (second only to smallpox vaccine) that has ever been routinely given to children, but it also was the one first responsible for putting pressure on the B. pertussis microbe to evolve to evade the vaccine beginning at the latest in the 1970s (according to some researchers, evolution began in the late 1950s). Even in the infant monkey study by Warfel et al published by FDA in 2014, it was clear that both whole cell and acellular pertussis vaccine did not prevent infection and transmission in vaccinated monkeys—the only difference was that the monkeys given whole cell DPT cleared the infection more quickly than those given acellular pertussis. Of course, FDA spun it to the public a different way—that acellular vaccine was the only one that failed to block infection and transmission.

In a 2016 commentary written by Fisher, Pertussis Microbe Evolves to Evade the Vaccine As Experts Argue About Why, she referenced medical literature that explains that pertussis whooping cough has been circulating in highly vaccinated populations, whether they have coverage with whole cell DPT or acellular DTaP.

There were researchers studying DPT vaccine effectiveness in the 1970s and 80s reporting widespread vaccine failures/waning immunity, including Trollfors in 1984, when looking at populations with very high DPT vaccine coverage among children.

See: Pertussis Microbe Evolves to Evade the Vaccine As Experts Argue About Why

There is another study just published which confirms that acellular vaccine is not to blame for what looks like a resurgence of pertussis in the U.S. Published in March of 2018 in the journal Translational Medicine Science, the title of the study is: The impact of past vaccination coverage and immunity on pertussis resurgence.

Researchers looked at whooping cough outbreaks in Massachusetts 1990-2005 and said they “found little evidence that the switch to the acellular vaccine contributed to the Massachusetts outbreaks.”

Essentially, they blamed outbreaks on waning immunity of both vaccines.

Fisher believes that bringing back the older whole cell pertussis would be a national tragedy. She told Health Impact News:

Bringing back whole cell DPT must not succeed. It would be a tragedy for this country to bring back the highly reactive and ineffective whole cell pertussis vaccine for infants. Although acellular pertussis vaccine can still cause encephalopathy, it does so less frequently than whole cell pertussis vaccine, a fact proven in many acellular pertussis vaccine studies pre-licensure and post-licensure (after 1996).

The U.S. Government is NOT Looking Out for Your Health

Shortly after President Donald Trump was elected to office, he met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long time proponent of vaccine safety.

There were reports that Kennedy would head up a new commission on vaccine safety. (See: Trump Appoints Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To Chair Vaccine Safety Commission.)

There were also reports that President Trump had serious questions about vaccine safety and the link between vaccines and autism.

However, more recently, Stat News has reported that Bill Gates has made several visits to the White House to discuss a “universal flu vaccine” with the President.

Did something change the President’s mind regarding vaccines once he took office?

A similar phenomenon happened with the Obamas after they took up residence in the White House. President Obama made campaign promises to label genetically modified food and promote transparency in the nation’s food supply.

However, once in office, he promoted pro-GMO policies that benefited biotech companies—NOT the American public.

Likewise, first lady Michelle Obama launched an organic garden project at the White House shortly after they took office, complete with a composting system and beehives.

But as time went on, the first lady promoted programs that held up the official USDA stances on food and Big Ag. (See: How First Lady’s Organic Garden Became a Junk Food Campaign.)

If one wants to be truly healthy and make informed decisions about one’s health, do not look to government agencies or politicians for help, as it could cost you dearly.

Hope for Whooping Cough: Mega Vitamin C Therapy

In conclusion, I don’t want to leave our readers without hope. There are alternatives to what Big Pharma and Big Ag offers Americans.

Dr. Suzanne Humphries, once a pro-vaccine medical doctor, now educates people about how to be truly healthy.

She has written a guide to help families deal with whooping cough naturally with very valuable advice: Vitamin C Treatment of Whooping Cough—Where Vaccines and Antibiotics Have Failed

We are very grateful to doctors and health professionals like her and others who have dedicated their lives to the truth, even to the sacrifice of their careers, so that others can benefit from their experience and knowledge in the face of persecution against those who would seek to silence them.

Note: This article was originally published in Vaccine Impact.

References: