Aug/Sept 2002

Deep Sustainability
Roar Ramesh Bjonnes

Community Owned Enterprise
Ron Phillips

Police State Measures Will Not Make Us Safe
Kayla M. Starr, MPH

Can Democracy Survive Endless War?
Edited by Eli Pariser

A Popular Revolt This November
Ted Glick

Turning the Trolls to Stone: Strategy for the Global Justice Movement
Starhawk

Navigating the Tides of Change
David LaChapelle

Dispelling the Myths About Smallpox
Michael Framson

Observations Of A Medical Revolutionary
Doug Falkner

The Emergence of Mind-Body Medicine
Robert Newman

A Childhood Stolen and Redeemed
John Darling

Healing Hints
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

Flax Seed
Rebecca Wood

The Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl

The Movie Mystic: "Beautiful Mind"
Stephen Simon

BACK TO TOP

Dispelling the Myths About Smallpox

By Michael Framson

It is essential for the U.S. to have a sound, workable plan to respond to an act of bioterrorism, and enough safe and effective vaccines for every American who wants to use them. However, there are legitimate concerns about current plans for citizens to be vaccinated without voluntary, informed consent. National vaccination programs targeting civilians, including children, are being proposed in model state emergency health powers legislation that would give public health officials the power to use the state militia to enforce vaccination or quarantine during state-declared health emergencies. It is a fundamental human right to be fully informed regarding the risks, known and unknown, or benefits of any medical intervention and to make a voluntary decision about whether to take the risk. This has been the centerpiece of bioethics ever since the Nuremberg Code was adopted after World War II and the doctrine of informed consent was introduced into case law in 1957.

Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson has declared that there is a smallpox vaccination with the names of every American man, woman, and child on it. If in the near future regularly scheduled television pro-gramming is interrupted with news bulletins that a suspected case of smallpox has occurred in Washington DC and well-planned and rehearsed emergency measures are activated, what will you do? If the hysteria following 9/11 that many Americans displayed in rushing to get prescriptions of the antibiotic Cipro after isolated cases of anthrax is any clue, then we may be in store for pandemonium.

The press, unfortunately, has created a level of fear surrounding the disease known as smallpox, portraying it as so contagious that a case in DC would quickly multiply into tens or hundreds of thousands in distant parts of the country, with a projected fatality rate of thirty percent, and the only safeguard supposedly vaccination.

It is essential to get the hype and hyper-ventilating out of the way now, and examine the facts that are known today about smallpox, and the inherent problems with the vaccine. First, vaccines by their very nature are inherently dangerous. The three unlicensed smallpox vaccines (including Dryvax) to be used preemptively to vaccinate 500,000 first responders have never been tested for safety or efficacy in controlled trials. Dryvax, the old live vaccinia virus vaccine has sometimes been treated in the media similar to routine childhood vaccinations like the MMR. The smallpox vaccine may have caused more reactions, injuries, and deaths and has the highest risk for complications of any vaccine. It is one of the crudest of any vaccine ever used by humans on a mass basis. By comparison the smallpox vaccine contains approximately 200 different antigens in which a susceptible person might react, whereas the trivalent MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) contains 24 potentially reactive antigens.

The subset of the population susceptible to react to the smallpox vaccine is a significantly larger percentage of our population today than it was three decades ago when smallpox vaccination was halted in the U.S. Those of known risk are people with suppressed immune systems (leukemia, lymphoma, generalized malignancy, solid organ transplantation, cellular or humoral immunity disorders, therapy with alkylating agents, antimetabolites, radiation or high-dose coritcosterioid therapy) including people with lupus, herpes, HIV and other diseases affecting the immune system. People with eczema or other chronic skin conditions like contact dermatitis are also at a higher risk for complications from the vaccine.

Maybe we should hold off, for the moment, to be first in line to get a smallpox vaccination, while we take the time to examine what we have been led to believe about smallpox. General beliefs about smallpox include: (1) Smallpox is highly contagious and could spread rapidly, killing millions. (2) Smallpox can be spread by casual contact with an infected person. (3) The death rate from smallpox is thought to be 30%. (4) There is no treatment for smallpox. (5) The smallpox vaccine will protect a person from getting the disease. As it turns out, these beliefs are not the facts.

At the recent June 20, 2002, meeting of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) in Atlanta, and the June 8th CDC meeting in St. Louis, many testimonies and comments were presented by public participants and by various physicians and researchers associated with the CDC. The following may put to rest some of the fears about smallpox. It’s unfor-tunate that the major press has ignored these historic meetings to ask tough questions of the CDC regarding the truth about smallpox and smallpox vaccinations, which are becoming the basis for some of the most dra-conian public health measures and assaults on our basic constitutional rights and freedoms.

Myth #1: Smallpox is highly contagious. “Smallpox has a slow transmission and is not highly contagious,” stated Joel Kuritsky, MD, director of the National Immunization Program and Early Smallpox Response and Planning at the CDC. In fact the Oregon Health Division’s CD summary states, “Smallpox is a wily bug but not usually as contagious as we modern humans believe.” These statements are in direct contradiction to nearly everything we have ever heard or read about smallpox.

Myth #2: Smallpox is easily spread by casual contact with an infected person. Smallpox will not rapidly disseminate throughout the community. Even after the development of the rash, the infection is slow to spread. “The infection is spread by droplet contamination; coughing or sneezing are not generally part of the infection. Smallpox will not spread like wildfire,” said Walter A. Orenstein, M.D., Director of the National Immunization Program (NIP) at the CDC. He stated that the spread of smallpox to casual contacts is the “exception to the rule.” Only 8% of cases in Africa were contracted by accidental contact.

Transmission of smallpox occurs only after intense contact, defined as “constant exposure of a person that is within 6-7 feet for a minimum of 6-7 days.” Dr. Orenstein reported that in Africa, 92% of all cases came from close associations and in India, all cases came from prolonged personal contact. Dr. Tom Mack from the University of Southern California stated that in Pakistan, 27% of cases demonstrated no transmission to close associates. Nearly 37% had a transmission of only one generation, meaning that the second person to contract smallpox did not pass it onto the third person. These statistics directly contradict models that predict an exponential spread to millions.

Even without medical care, isolation but not quarantine was the best way to stop the spread of smallpox in Third World, population dense areas. Quarantine has been shown to be an ineffective can-of-worms. With a slow transmission rate and an informed public, Mack estimated that the total number of smallpox cases in America would be less than 10, a far cry from the millions postulated by the press.

Dr. Kuritsky said at the CDC Public Forum on Smallpox on June 8 in St. Louis, “Given the slow transmission rate and that people need to be in close contact for nearly a week to spread the infection, the scenario in which a terrorist could infect himself with smallpox and contaminate an entire city by walking through the streets touching people is purely fiction.”

Myth #3: The death rate from smallpox is 30%. Nearly every newspaper and journal article quotes this statistic. However, as pointed out in the presentation by Dr. Tom Mack, it appears that the “30% fatality rate” has come from skewed data. Dr. Mack has worked with smallpox extensively and saw more than 120 outbreaks in Pakistan throughout the early 1970s. Villages would apparently have “an importation” every 5-10 years, regardless of vaccination status, and the outbreak could always be predicated by living conditions and social arrangements. There were many small outbreaks and individual cases that never came to the attention of the local authorities.

Mack stated that even with poor medical care, the case fatality rate in adults was “much lower than is generally advertised” and thought to be 10-15%. He said that the statistics were “loaded with children that had a much higher fatality,” making the average death rate reported to be much higher. Amazingly, he revealed his opinion that even without mass vaccination, “smallpox would have died out anyway. It just would have taken longer.”

Myth #4: There is no treatment for smallpox.
A more accurate statement is “there are no conventional, allopathic, pharmaco-logical drugs for smallpox.” However one only has to look at the history of other health modalities that have effective treatments for smallpox and other diseases.

Homeopathy, for example, had an especially impressive track record during the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in the United States. The case-fatality rates within conventional medicine were running 28%-30% as opposed to 1%-2% for homeopathic treatments. Homeopathic prophylaxis for smallpox during a smallpox outbreak in Corpus Christy, Texas had similar outcomes. Conventional treatments (typical vaccinations) had 20% mortality versus no fatalities and no smallpox with homeopathic prophylaxis preparations. Vitamin C has been proven in hundreds of studies to be effective in protecting the body from viral infections including smallpox. One has to ask the obvious question, “Is conventional medicine taking us down a very dangerous road when other proven systems of medicine like homeopathy and vitamin supplementation are safer and more effective?”

Myth #5: The vaccine will keep me from getting the infection. Most people believe that all vaccines work to protect them, meaning that the vaccine will be clinically effective. What most people do not know is that vaccines have never been proven to protect them from getting the infection. This little known fact is true for most vaccines including smallpox. For example, with the chickenpox vaccine, no data exists regarding post-exposure efficacy of the current varicella vaccine. Vaccinated persons have a less severe outbreak than unvaccinated. And the findings of pertussis vaccine efficacy studies have not demonstrated a direct correlation between antibody response and protection against pertussis disease either. Dr. Harold Margolis, Senior Advisor to the Director for Smallpox Planning and Response, stated at the June 20th meeting in Atlanta that “the vaccine decreased the death rate among those vaccinated by ‘modifying the disease,’ not by preventing infection.”

In addition to the 500,000 medical first responders, the June 20th CDC meeting suggested that first responders should also include a class to be defined as “economic first responders,” those who would be necessary in keeping the economy moving in the event of a nationwide “lockdown” caused by an outbreak. This group would include pilots, truck drivers, food handlers, etc. However, one of the major problems with any vaccination program is the lack of vaccinia immune globulin (VIG), the “antidote” that is needed for those who experience a severe reaction to the vaccine. A recent NY Times article reports that there are only 700 doses currently available. Dr. Tom Mack, among others at the CDC warned that, “in the absence of VIG, extensive vaccination would be extremely dangerous.”

Are we setting the stage for an unprecedented health disaster unlike we have ever seen before in America? States one by one are enacting sweeping emergency health powers acts, which call for forced vaccinations, quaran-tines, forced medical treatments and sweeping police powers. The Working Group on Civilian Biodefense has stated, “The discovery of a single suspected case of smallpox must be treated as an international health emergency.” But world health records (England, Germany, Italy, the Philippines, British India, etc.) document that devastating epidemics have followed mass vaccination. An important lesson should be learned from the worst smallpox disaster which occurred in the Philippines following a 10 year compulsory US program that administered 25 million vaccinations to its population of 10 million. The result of this vaccination effort was 170,000 cases and more than 75,000 deaths from “smallpox,” in a country which had only scattered cases in rural villages prior to the onslaught of vaccines.

We must not forget the lessons of history and force medical practices on people which are dangerous and don’t work, especially with the knowledge that there are safer and more effective alternatives.

Most of this information has come from the notes of Dr. Sherri Tenpenny who attended the June 8th and June 20th CDC national meetings on Smallpox. Transcripts from the CDC meetings will be available in 6 months. Michael Framson is the Oregon represen-tative of the National Vaccine Information Center and follows issues of public health. He lives in Medford, OR and be contacted at mframson@mind.net.