(This originally ran February 27, 2014. As the second edition of Heather Fraser’s book is now out, it seemed a great time to revisit this blog in the hopes that we can reach even more people. — Editor)

At some point in 2010 I saw a simple website, where the margins of the text were too narrow, causing the sentences to run too wide, that claimed that the peanut allergy epidemic we are now experiencing is due to peanut oil being used in vaccines. I am a peanut allergy mom. I am angry and disappointed on a near-daily basis about the hand we’ve been dealt with our son, and I want answers. I knew my child was vaccine injured; I saw the downward spiral happen before my very eyes when he was two months old. However, I didn’t believe the text in front of me. I didn’t think it was true that there was peanut oil in today’s vaccines. I searched for information about peanut oil and vaccines, but everything I read contained the exact words of the outdated site I’d already seen, as if everyone else got their information from the same place, and none of it cited a source. I let it die and moved on.

The next year a new book was published by Heather Fraser of Ontario, Canada called The Peanut Allergy Epidemic: What’s Causing It and How to Stop It. I read reviews here and there, and people mentioned the peanut oil in vaccines again. I dismissed the book, assuming the entire theory behind it was the peanut oil in our vaccines rumor.

Fast forward to 2014: I was reading about how widely accepted it is in research that injected aluminum was responsible for some major afflictions — IgE production, increased allergenicity, and neurotoxicity. Rogue IgE antibodies are the cornerstone of asthma and anaphylactic food allergies. Aluminum neurotoxicity is the suspected cause of Alzheimer’s and, many believe, autism. If vaccines are point “A” and food allergies are point “D,” studies published in peer-reviewed journals don’t directly connect A to D. Instead, they connect point B, aluminum, to point C, IgE antibodies, and leave it to the reader to connect the outside dots — lest they be subjected to the Andrew Wakefield treatment. I spent days researching these terms and the studies that supported them, and time and time again Google was giving me Ms. Fraser’s book in the search results.

Another startling discovery came from the realization that if you want to know what’s causing an affliction in a large group of human beings, look to how researchers recreate those characteristics in the mice models they study. Peanut-allergic mice are created in the lab by feeding the mice, or forcing them to inhale, peanut protein fused to a bacterial toxin like diphtheria or cholera. It is truly that simple. The more I read, the more links to that book appeared on my screen.

Then I moved on to the relatively new Hib vaccine that has been part of the CDC vaccination schedule for two-month old babies only since 1990. I’d heard that there was something about the molecular structure and weight of the Hib bacterium that was so similar to peanut protein that the body confused the two. Again, all Google signs were pointing to The Peanut Allergy Epidemic. Finally, I stopped reinventing the wheel, went straight to Amazon, and ordered the book.

In short, what follows is what I learned, but I want to emphasize the need to read the book in its entirety. The note section at the back reads like a primer on “All You Ever Needed to Know about Peer-Reviewed Journal Vaccine Ingredient Studies that No One Talks About.”

A lot of people might be surprised to know that there are food oils in injectable vaccines. In the 1930s there was cottonseed oil in vaccines, followed by a short-lived spate of cottonseed oil allergies of about a decade that quietly went away with a change in formula. In the 1960s and 1970s a flu vaccine used peanut oil as an adjuvant to make a smaller amount of influenza antigen elicit a bigger antibody response from the immune system. From 1950-1980 an injectable penicillin was suspended in peanut oil to allow for a slow release of penicillin while the body metabolized the oil. The occasional anaphylactic death from subsequently eating peanuts made headlines.

Unfortunately, highly refined peanut oil does not have to be listed on the labels of foodstuffs or injectable medicines in the United States because it has been granted GRAS status — Generally Recognized As Safe — despite the fact that oil refiners know that it is not possible to remove all allergenic proteins from the oil. A sensitized child might be prescribed a medicine that contains peanut oil, and neither the parent nor doctor would know it, leading to a dangerous situation. However, all of that information is merely an interesting distraction in Heather Fraser’s book; a tangential history of the efficacy of America’s beloved peanut oil that is news to most of us.

One hundred pages into the book, the mind-boggling bureaucratic roller coaster begins. Four events happened all at once leading up to 1990 so that in 1995 a wave of peanut-allergic kindergarteners was sent to school for the first time.

The events of that perfect storm are:

1. The vitamin K1 shot became part of the general consent for treatment in hospital births in the mid-1980s. The injection was linked to leukemia in 1998, and the formula was changed in 2006. In both the new and the old versions, the popular brands of vitamin K1 contained a hefty dose of aluminum adjuvant to make a “depot” under the skin to slowly release the K1 over at least the next 2 months. The original formula contained castor oil, which is known to cross-sensitize immune systems to peanut oil. The 2006 reformulation of K1 replaced the castor oil with lecithin derived from soybean and egg. Due to the cross-reactivity molecular weights of soybean and peanut, soybean is sensitizing some babies to peanut and tree nut. That depot of aluminum is still in the infant body, churning out an IgE antibody response, at the time the baby receives the two-month vaccines. It is estimated that 4% of injected aluminum remains in the body for an indefinite period of years.

2. The invention of the bacterial Hib vaccine and its subsequent licensing for use in two-month old babies arrived in 1990. Children under the age of two years were not responding to the Hib vaccine’s carbohydrate antigen, which led manufacturers to create the CDC schedule’s first “conjugate vaccine” which covalently bonded the bacterium to a toxic carrier protein that the infants’ bodies would recognize: either tetanus or diphtheria toxin. This new carrier toxin acted as an adjuvant, stimulating an immune response. Two vaccines hit the market in 1988-89 for 15 – 18-month-old babies. By 1990 the age of use had been dropped to two-month-old babies, and an additional two more vaccines were on the market, being administered at the same time as the DTP and polio vaccines. It is now known that the structure and weight of the Hib bacteria proteins are very similar to the structure and weight of the peanut protein, which leads to cross reactivity to peanuts and tree nuts. We are, essentially, creating anaphylactic babies in the same manner researchers create anaphylactic mice: administering a peanut-like protein fused to adjuvant bacterial toxin.

3. By 1995 the countries of the western world were giving five vaccines in one needle for the first time. In the next three years there were 5,000 adverse reports filed in Canada, which is assumed to be only 10% of the actual adverse reactions. The effects of combining five viruses with multiple adjuvants and preservatives in one needle are essentially unstudied, though the Canadian Department of Pediatrics’ sheet on a five-in-one vaccine listed brain inflammation, convulsion, anorexia, infections, anaphylaxis, inconsolable screaming, and death as side effects.

4. In 1992 the already-crowded CDC vaccination schedule added additional doses of combination vaccines, resulting in load upon load of aluminum and antigens being delivered to the bodies of two-month old babies. Prior to this time the vaccination rates for children four years old and under in the western world were between 55% and 65%. The 1994 National Vaccine Plan aimed for 90% compliance for all infants and spent $500M to achieve it. Vaccinations became a requirement for preschools and daycares for the first time. Canada, Australia, and the U.K. made the same changes at the same time as the United States. Vaccination rates were suddenly at a record high — all well over 90% — on a jam-packed schedule of aluminum-loaded combination vaccines.

In the United States, emergency room records showed that from 1992-1994, 467 people per 100,000 were discharged from the ER after having experienced anaphylaxis. By 1995 that number had almost doubled to 876 per 100,000. By 2008 there were 1,000,000 peanut allergic children under 18 in the US and 2,000,000 adults.

We are overwhelming the immature newborn immune system with this toxic soup. It is not difficult to take Ms. Fraser’s collection of data and extrapolate the effect those reckless changes had on the similar epidemics of autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, asthma, epilepsy, childhood diabetes, and more. This country needs to take a step back and learn from the gigantic elephant in the room, even at the expense of loosening the reins of public health policy and admitting the cost that the vaccination schedule has had in collateral damage.

The most infuriating part of Ms. Fraser’s book is the light she shines into the dark corners of the “search for the cause” of the peanut allergy epidemic. She exposes the game of The Emperor Has No Clothes that has been played between pharmaceutical companies and the governments of the western world for at least the last 85 years. It is only acceptable — and, in fact, of utmost importance — to research a source of any epidemic as long as it is not vaccines, because the fact that vaccines are proven to be safe is unquestionable.

I know from my own research that the non-stop pressure to shout about vaccine safety from the rooftops is levied on the media by the pharmaceutical companies who pay advertising revenue for top-selling drugs, like those for erectile dysfunction or to chemically lower cholesterol. That pressure has birthed the media trend of promoting “blame the mother” research — blame her not only for what she ate while pregnant that caused an anaphylactic child, but for taking a dose of Tylenol while pregnant and causing ADHD in her child, or for catching the flu while pregnant and causing autism in her child.

As Ms. Fraser points out time and time again, no publicly promoted theory can explain the tidal wave of peanut-allergic kindergarteners in 1995 except for the ingredients of vaccines and the schedule they are administered on. Throughout her book she presents a painstakingly researched timeline and builds a convincing case of circumstantial evidence — the kind of facts that juries use to convict criminals every day of the week.

To order Heather Fraser’s book, The Peanut Allergy Epidemic: What’s Causing It and How to Stop It, click here.

~ Robyn Charron

Prior to attending law school, Robyn earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology and worked for two years in laboratories researching genetic disease. When her first child suffered an injury from vaccines at two months old, her conventional parenting went out the window, and she ushered in a world of organic food, supplements, and non-toxic living. She currently lives in Denver where she advocates for allergy awareness and parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children without government intervention.