Professor Peter McIntyre, one of the architects of Australia’s immunisation schedule, made quite a few admissions of problems with vaccines and our Australian vaccination laws in May last year (2017).
As Director of the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases, he was interviewed for the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) podcast series [UPDATE – he retired from this position in July 2018]. Find the podcast here:
MJA Podcasts 2017 Episode 24: Vaccination rates and incentives, with Prof Peter McIntyre
I could not get the interview to play in my browser, but I downloaded it via the download link and it played fine on my computer. It is also available on YouTube here:
Confessions of a Vaccine Salesman
Pertussis (whooping cough) and the media
Early in the interview, McIntyre attributes the initial drive for the No Jab No Pay law to a report that linked vaccination rates to postcodes, which showed that certain areas had low rates. He says this coincided with concern about the death of an infant from pertussis (whooping cough), and that pertussis occurrence and the death were not necessarily related to vaccination rates, but a relationship was made in the media messaging at the time:
that really spurred a lot of media coverage around areas, particularly, I guess areas that might be considered a bit more affluent or trendy in cities, where these rates were said to be low and potentially a problem. And that sort of coincided, I guess, with all the concern about pertussis and pertussis deaths from a young infant, and the two are not necessarily related, but they sort of got related in the media messaging around all of this.
In other words, the fear about the unvaccinated spreading pertussis was the result of hype by the media and not based on facts, according to McIntyre.
Measles and mothers
McIntyre admits the measles vaccination program has caused young infants to catch measles, starting around the 5m 15s mark.
He explains that mothers these days don’t have enough immunity to measles from their childhood vaccines to confer immunity to their babies, as they did before the vaccine. So when there are measles outbreaks in Australia a high proportion of the cases are infants, unlike before the vaccine was introduced.
He says, of today’s mothers:
By the time they’ve reached their twenties or thirties, their antibody levels that are transmitted to the baby may be quite low compared to what used to happen when mothers had measles acquired from natural infection.
He even says “that shouldn’t mean we go back”, indirectly admitting this is a problem.
He also says:
in a lot of cases, the antibody levels may have gone down to well below protective by six months of age and then of course, you don’t get your first [measles vaccine] dose till 12 months.
The reality is that before measles vaccination most children had measles at a young age, when the disease was not considered dangerous, then were fortunate enough to have lifelong immunity. Also, babies were well-protected by immunity conferred from their mothers via the placenta for the first 6 months of life, longer if they were breast fed.
Seeing health officials and the press keep pushing for wider measles vaccination so babies will be protected, to do so when health officials know perfectly well it is the vaccination program that has left infants vulnerable is dishonest in the extreme.
Measles in older groups
McIntyre goes on to say the other biggest group who catch measles today are the 15 to 35 year-old age group, and he makes a few guesses about reasons why. He assumes the infected have not been vaccinated, ignoring the most obvious contender – that measles vaccine immunity wears off.
This is really serious – measles is not a dangerous disease in young children, but it can be dangerous and very unpleasant for adults. All measles vaccination has done is defer getting the disease from an age when it is not dangerous to an age when it is.
Measles comes from somewhere else
We also hear from McIntyre the idiotic
we don’t have our own home-grown measles…any measles we get now is really coming in from elsewhere.
What a silly, useless thing to say, and he goes on about it a lot. What’s the point of claiming a country is free of an infectious disease that is present in other parts of the world and enters said country regularly? It is just a propaganda ploy.
He is actually confirming the fact that our population here in Australia does not have a lot of immunity to measles, despite extensive measles vaccination since 1970. If every adult had lifelong immunity like they did before the vaccine, there would be no problem when visitors arrive carrying the virus.
Australia’s vaccination laws
During the podcast McIntyre makes some surprising admissions (for a top vaccination official) about Australia’s vaccination laws.
The interviewer asks whether the No Jab No Pay or Play laws are keeping babies safe, and he answers quite honestly. He says the laws have increased vaccination rates, but points out this needs to be balanced with accessibility to education:
it’s terribly important to evaluate this carefully… there are people there who just worried, concerned about well, just fearful about some aspects of vaccines and who for the whom the dollars are really important. That could mean that a child who would otherwise benefit from early childhood education and child care or pre-school misses out…we know that a child missing out on early childhood educational opportunities, we know that that is really bad, in terms of your subsequent educational progression.
McIntyre also debunks the community’s main argument for the laws, the idea an unvaccinated child is a risk to a vaccinated one. He says:
It’s a little bit of myth that there is these terrible disease risks that other children who are in the child care will be exposed to from an unimmunised child
and
But it is a bit of a myth that there’s this terrible disease risk that other children or other parents doing “the right thing” are exposed to by these unimmunised children, particularly when you’re talking about older kids in pre-school. Conversely, with an older kid in pre-school, that’s when you’re really missing out on your kickstart for school, if you’re excluded from participating in that.
Still on the theme of whether unvaccinated children spread diseases, McIntyre alludes to the ineffectiveness of the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine.
even with 100% of kids getting immunised about pertussis, pertussis, unfortunately still circulates in the community.
Pertussis will continue to circulate even though we’ve got high immunisation rates
He then goes on to say the only way to protect young babies, less than two months old, is to vaccinate mothers in pregnancy. He believes this is a good idea despite the fact the pertussis booster given to adults (dTpa) has not been tested in pre-licensing clinical trials for safety in pregnancy for either the mother or the child, and especially concerning, it contains aluminium, which when injected is known to be a dangerous neurotoxin.
McIntyre finishes up by casting some common sense on the argument “immunocompromised” children are at risk from unvaccinated children, saying these children are unlikely to be attending regular childcare or kindergarten:
there’s still this view out there … that unimmunised children in a child care centre or a pre-school, pose a huge risk to fully immunised children, which unless you’ve got a fully immunised child who happens to have some bad disease, like leukemia or something, in which case they’re probably very unlikely to be attending a regular pre-school, but unless you’ve got children like that, then basically everyone else, they’re really not at risk.
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I encourage you to have a listen! (It’s only 18 minutes.) And please let us know what you think in the comments.
– Robin
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