by Viera Scheibner, PhD
Nexus Magazine, Volume 5, #5
(August-September '98)
from
NexusMagazine Website
Many infants who
suffer the so-called 'shaken baby syndrome' may be victims of
undiagnosed vaccine damage.
About the Author:
Viera Scheibner, PhD, is a retired principal research
scientist with a doctorate in natural sciences. During her
distinguished career she published three books and some 90
scientific papers in refereed scientific journals.
Since the mid-1980s when she helped develop the Cotwatch
breathing monitor for babies at risk of cot death (sudden infant
death syndrome, or SIDS), she has done extensive research into
vaccines and vaccinations and in 1993 published her book,
Vaccination: The Medical Assault on the Immune System.
Dr Scheibner is often asked by lawyers to provide expert reports
for vaccine-damage court cases, and she regularly conducts
lectures. Her previous articles for NEXUS covered the
SIDS/vaccines link (2/05) and the brain-eating bugs/vaccines
connection (3/03).
178 Govetts
Leap Road
Blackheath, NSW 2785
Australia
Telephone: +61 (0)2 4787 8203
Fax: +61 (0)2 4787 8988
Email:
vscheibner@mpx.com.au
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Recently there has been quite an "epidemic" of the so-called "shaken baby
syndrome". Parents, usually the fathers, or other care-givers such as
nannies have increasingly been accused of shaking a baby to the point of
causing permanent brain damage and death. Why? Is there an unprecedented
increase in the number of people who commit infanticide or have an ambition
to seriously hurt babies? Or is there something more sinister at play?
Some time ago I started getting requests from lawyers or the accused parents
themselves for expert reports. A close study of the history of these cases
revealed something distinctly sinister: in every single case, the symptoms
appeared shortly after the baby's vaccinations.
While investigating the personal medical history of these babies based on
the care-givers' diaries and medical records, I quickly established that
these babies were given one or more of the series of so-called routine
shots-hepatitis B, DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus), polio and
HiB (Haemophilus influenza type B) - shortly before they developed symptoms of illness
resulting in serious brain damage or death.
The usual scenario is that a baby is born and does well initially. At the
usual age of about two months it is administered the first series of
vaccines as above. (Sometimes a hepatitis B injection is given shortly after
birth while the mother and child are still in hospital. However, a great
number of babies now die within days or within two to four weeks of birth
after hepatitis B vaccination, as documented by the records of the VAERS
[Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] in the USA.)
So, the baby stops
progressing, starts deteriorating, and usually develops signs of respiratory
tract infection. Then comes the second and third injections, and tragedy
strikes: the child may cry intensely and inconsolably, may stop feeding
properly, vomit, have difficulty swallowing, become irritable, stop
sleeping, and may develop convulsions with accelerating progressive
deterioration of its condition and mainly its brain function.
This deterioration may be fast, or may slowly inch in until the parents
notice that something is very wrong with their child and then rush it to the
doctor or hospital. Interestingly, they are invariably asked when the baby
was immunized. On learning that the baby was indeed "immunized", the parents
may be reassured that its symptoms will all clear up.
They are sent home
with the advice, "Give your baby Panadol".
If they persist in considering
the baby's reaction serious, they may be labeled as anxious parents or
trouble-makers. So the parents go home, and the child remains in a serious
condition or dies.
Until recently, the vaccine death would have just been labeled "sudden
infant death", particularly if the symptoms and pathological findings were
minimal. However, nowadays, with an alarmingly increasing frequency, the
parents (or at least one of them, usually the father) may be accused of
shaking the baby to death.
The accused may even "confess" to shaking the
baby, giving the reason, for example, that having found the baby lying still
and not breathing and/or with a glazed look in its eyes, they shook it
gently-as is only natural-in their attempt to revive it. Sometimes,
ironically, they save the baby's life, only to be accused of causing the
internal injuries that made the baby stop breathing in the first place, and
which in fact were already present when they shook the baby to revive it.
No matter what the parents say or do, everything is construed against them.
If they are crying and emotional, they will be accused of showing signs of
guilt. If they manage to remain composed and unemotional, they will be
called calculating and controlling-and guilty because of that.
In another scenario the distraught parents try to describe the symptoms to
an attending doctor in hospital or a surgery but are totally at a loss to
understand what has happened to their baby. To their shock and dismay, they
later discover that while they were describing the observed symptoms, the
doctor or another staff member was writing three ominous words in the
medical record: shaken baby syndrome.
Many of these parents end up indicted and even sentenced to prison for a
crime that somebody else committed. Some of these cases have been resolved
by acquittal on appeal or have been won based on expert reports
demonstrating vaccines as the cause of the observed injuries or death.
However, only God and a good lawyer can help those parents or care-givers
who happen to be uneducated, or have a criminal record, particularly for
violence, or have a previous history of a similar "unexplained" death of a
baby in their care, or, worse still, a vaccine-injured baby with a broken
arm or fractured skull. More and more often, the unfortunate parents are
given the option of a "deal": if they confess and/or plead guilty, they will
get only a couple of years in prison; but if they don't, they may end up
getting 20 years.
I was told by a social worker in the United States that many foster parents
are rotting in US prisons. First, they are forced to vaccinate their
charges, and then, when side effects or death occur, they are accused of
causing them.
Inevitably the possibility exists that infanticide or child abuse is
involved in some of the cases. However, there is no determinable reason why
so many parents or other care-givers would suddenly begin to behave like
this. It is incredibly insensitive and callous to immediately suspect and
accuse the distraught, innocent parents of harming their own baby.
MEDICAL STUDIES
Let's now have a look at medical literature dealing with shaken baby
syndrome and child abuse.
Caffey (1972, 1974)1,2 described the "whiplash shaken infant syndrome" as a
result of manual shaking by the extremities with whiplash-induced
intracranial and intraocular bleedings, linked with permanent brain damage
and mental retardation. He referred to his own paper, published almost 30
years prior to the above-quoted papers, which described what he called "the
original six battered babies in 1945".
The essential elements in this
description were subdural hematomas, intraocular bleedings and multiple
traction changes in the long bones. These findings became a benchmark of the
"evidence" that a child had been shaken before developing these signs.
Reece (1993)3 analyzed fatal child abuse and sudden infant death syndrome
(SIDS) and considered the critical diagnostic decisions. He emphasized that
distinguishing between an unexpected infant death due to SIDS and one due to
child abuse challenges pediatricians, family physicians, pathologists and
child protection agencies. On the one hand, they must report instances of
suspected child abuse and protect other children in the family; and on the
other, all agree that the knowledge in this area is incomplete and ambiguity
exists in many cases.
Duhaime et al. (1992)4 wrote that "patients with intradural
hemorrhage and
no history of trauma must also have clinical and radiographic findings of
blunt impact to the head, unexplained long-bone fractures or other soft
tissue inflicted injury, in order to completely eliminate the possibility of
spontaneous intracranial hemorrhage such as might rarely occur from a
vascular malformation or a bleeding disorder".
While it is not disputed that some parents and care-givers may cause the
above injuries by mistreating infants, one must take great care in
interpreting similar pathological findings of injuries caused by other
insults which have nothing to do with mechanical injuries and mistreatments
of infants.
I shall never forget the father of a 10-month-old infant, who, after being
acquitted on appeal of causing shaken baby syndrome, said words to the
effect, "We still don't know what killed our baby". It did not occur to them
and nobody told them that it was the vaccine that killed their baby.
So what else can cause brain swelling, intracranial bleeding, ocular retinal
hemorrhages, and broken skull and other bones? Ever since the mass
vaccination of infants began, reports of serious brain, cardiovascular,
metabolic and other injuries started filling pages of medical journals.
Indeed, vaccines like the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine are actually
used to induce encephalo-myelitis (experimental allergic encephalomyelitis)
in laboratory animals (Levine and Sowinski, 19735). This is characterized by
brain swelling and hemorrhaging of an extent similar to that caused by
mechanical injuries (Iwasa et al., 19856).
Munoz et al. (1981)7 studied biological activities of crystalline
pertussigen-a toxin produced by Bordetella pertussis, the causative agent in
pertussis and an active ingredient in all types of pertussis vaccines
whether whole-cell or acellular-in a number of laboratory experiments with
mice.
They established that minute amounts of pertussigen induced
hypersensitivity to histamine (still detected 84 days after administration),
leucocytosis, production of insulin, increased production of IgE and G1
antibodies to hen egg albumin, susceptibility to anaphylactic shock and
vascular permeability of striated muscle. A dose of 546 nanograms per mouse
killed 50 per cent of mice.
Typically, the deaths were delayed. When a dose
of five micrograms of pertussigen was administered, most mice did not gain
weight and died by day five; the last mouse died on day eight. A
one-microgram dose of one preparation killed four out of five mice. They
first gained weight from days two to five, but then remained at nearly
constant weight until they died.
Even the one that survived for 16 days (it
was then killed) experienced crises (stopped putting on weight) on the days
when the others died. Had that one lived longer, it might have died on day
24. This is another of the critical days-identified by Cotwatch research
into babies' breathing-on which babies have flare-ups of stress-induced
breathing, or die, after vaccination.
Interestingly, when laboratory animals develop symptoms of vaccine damage
and then die, it is never considered coincidental; but when children develop
the same symptoms and/or die after the administration of the same vaccines,
it is considered coincidental or caused by their parents or other carers.
When all this fails, then it is considered "mysterious".
Delayed reactions are the norm rather than the exception. This has been
explained as a consequence of an immunological intravascular complexing of
particulate antigen (whole-cell or acellular pertussis organisms) (Wilkins,
19888). However, vaccinators have great difficulty with this, and as a rule
draw largely irrelevant timelines for accepting the causal link between
administration of vaccines and onset of reactions-usually 24 hours or up to
seven days. However, most reactions to vaccines are delayed, and most cases
are then considered unrelated to vaccination.
One only has to peruse a product insert of hepatitis B vaccine to see that
besides local reactions, a number of neurological signs may occur, such as
paraesthesia and paralysis (including Guillain-Barre syndrome, optic
neuritis and multiple sclerosis).
Devin et al. (1996)9 described retinal hemorrhages which are emphatically
being considered the sure sign of child abuse, even though these can be and
are caused by vaccines. Goetting and Sowa (1990)10 described retinal
hemorrhage which occurred after cardiopulmonary resuscitation in children.
Bulging fontanelle due to brain swelling was described by Jacob and
Mannino
(1979)11 as a direct reaction to the DPT vaccine. They described a case of a
seven-month-old baby who, nine hours after the third DPT vaccination,
developed a bulging anterior fontanelle and became febrile and irritable.
Bruising and easy bleeding is one of the characteristic signs of the blood
clotting disorder, thrombocytopenia-a recognized side-effect of many
vaccines. Its first signs are easy bruising and bleeding and petechial (spot-like)
rash. Thrombo-cytopenia may result in brain and other hemorrhages (Woerner
et al., 198112).
The convulsions which follow one in 1,750 doses of the DPT vaccines (Cody et
al., 198113) can result in unexplained falls in bigger children who can sit
up or stand, which may cause linear cracks of the skull and other fractures.
When one considers that babies are supposed to get a minimum of three doses
of DPT and OPV (oral polio vaccine), then the risk of developing a
convulsion is one in 580, and with five doses the risk rises to one in 350.
This means that a great number of babies develop convulsions after
vaccination between the ages of two to six months, at about 18 months, and
at five to six years. The convulsions often occur when the parent or another carer is not looking, and the child, while standing or sitting on the floor,
simply falls backwards or onto its arm.
All these signs can be misdiagnosed as a result of mechanical injuries,
particularly so because vaccinators simply refuse to admit that vaccines
cause serious injuries, or they only pay lip service to the damage caused by
the pernicious routine of up to 18 vaccines with which babies are supposed
to be injected within six months of birth.
The court system should therefore be more open to the documented viable and
alternative explanations of the observed injuries, and be more wary of the
obviously biased statements of the pro-vaccination "experts", that nothing
else but vigorous shaking can cause retinal hemorrhages-even though such
statements only reflect their ignorance. Such "experts" then go home and
continue advising parents to vaccinate, and thus, with impunity, they cause
more and more cases of vaccine-injured babies and children.
THE UK MEASLES EPIDEMIC THAT NEVER WAS
The term "Munchausen syndrome per proxy" has been used to identify
individuals who kill or otherwise harm a child in order to attract attention
to themselves. The term was used in many instances in the 1980s when earlier
attempts were fashioned to explain some of the cases of sudden infant death.
According to Meadow (1995),14 "Munchausen syndrome per proxy" is flamboyant
terminology originally used for journalistic reasons. It was a term commonly
applied to adults who presented themselves with false illness stories, just
like the fictional Baron von Munchausen who traveled on cannon balls. The
term is now used to apply to parents of children who present with false
illness stories fabricated by a parent or someone else in that position.
While the term may have some validity in describing this special form of
child abuse in the documented cases of parents slowly poisoning their child
or exposing it to unnecessary and often dangerous and invasive medical
treatments, more recently it became a way for some doctors to camouflage the
real observed side-effects of especially measles (M), measles-mumps-rubella
(MMR) and measles-rubella (MR) vaccinations in the UK. Many thousands of
British children (up to 15,000 in my considered opinion) developed signs of
autism usually associated with bowel symptoms after being given the above
vaccines in 1994.
The Bulletin of Medical Ethics published two articles, in 1994 and 1995,
dealing with this problem. The October 1994 article ("Is your measles jab
really necessary?") stated that during November 1994 the UK Government would
be running a mass campaign of measles vaccination with the intention of
reaching every child between the ages of five and sixteen.
It claimed that the purpose of this campaign was to prevent an epidemic that
would otherwise occur in 1995, with up to 200,000 cases and up to 50 deaths.
The article also showed that since 1990 there have been only 8,000 to 10,000
cases of measles each year in England and Wales, and that coincidentally
there was an epidemic of only about 5,000 cases in Scotland in the winter of
1993-94. Between May and August 1994 the notification rate in England and
Wales dropped sharply, so there was nothing that clearly suggested an
imminent epidemic.
The nine-page article in the August 1995 issue of BME stated among other
things that on 14 September 1992 the Department of Health (DoH) hastily
withdrew two brands of MMR vaccines following a leak to the national press
about the risk of children developing mumps meningitis after administration
of these vaccines. Both brands contained the Urabe mumps vaccine strain
which had been shown to cause mumps meningitis in one in 1,044 vaccinees (Yawata,
199415).
Based on the epidemiology of measles, there was never going to be a measles
epidemic in 1995 and there was certainly no justification for concomitant
rubella vaccination. The mass campaign was planned as an experimental
alternative to a two-dose schedule of measles-mumps-rubella vaccination.
The
UK Government knowingly misled parents about the need for the campaign and
about the relative risks of measles and measles vaccination. The DoH broke
the European Union's law about contracts and tendering to ensure that
specific pharmaceutical companies were awarded the contracts to provide the
campaign vaccines.
All this must have been extremely fortunate for the drug
companies in question, since the supplies of measles and rubella
vaccines-which they'd been left with in 1992 and for which there was
virtually no demand-were soon to go out of date.
The vaccination campaign achieved very little. Indeed, in 1995 there were
twice as many cases of serologically confirmed rubella in England and Wales
as in the same period of 1994: 412 cases against 217. Six cases of rubella
in pregnant women were reported. The data indicate that more measles cases
were notified in the first quarter of 1995 (n=11) than in the first quarter
of 1994 (n=9).
Despite this, there were several claims from government
doctors that measles transmission had stopped among school children. Higson
(1995)16 wrote that two DoH officials tried to justify the success of the
measles and rubella vaccination campaign by using data that cannot be used
to give year-on-year comparison for measles infections. Indeed, he wrote
that the data collected by the public health departments on the measles
notifications show no indication of benefit from the highly expensive
campaign. The British government spent some £20 million purchasing the
near-expiry-date measles and rubella vaccines.
Some 1,500 parents are now participating in a class action over the damage
(most often the bowel problems and autism) suffered by their children.
Wakefield et al. (1998)17 published a paper in the Lancet in which they
reported on a consecutive series of children with chronic enterocolitis and
regressive developmental disorder which occurred 1 to 14 days (median, 6.3
days) after M, MMR and MR vaccinations. They also quoted the "opioid excess"
theory of autism, that autistic disorders result from the incomplete
breakdown and excessive absorption of gut-derived peptides from foods,
including barley, rye, oats and milk/dairy product casein, caused by vaccine
injury to the bowel.
These peptides may exert central-opioid effects,
directly or through the formation of ligands with peptidase enzymes required
for the breakdown of endogenous central-nervous-system opioids, leading to
disruption of normal neuroregulation and brain development by endogenous
encephalins and endorphins.
A number of British parents approached me last year and complained that
their children had developed behavioral and bowel problems after
vaccination (as above), and that instead of getting help from their doctors
they were told that they just imagined the symptoms or caused them in order
to attract attention to themselves.
The term "Munchausen syndrome per proxy"
was used. It caused a lot of hardship and marital problems and did nothing
for the victims of vaccination. Their stories were horrifying.
EDUCATION ON VACCINE DANGERS
In summary, the trail of vaccine disasters is growing. Not only do
vaccinations do nothing to improve the health of children and other
recipients, they cause serious health problems and hardship for their
families by victimizing the victims of vaccines.
Parents of small children of vaccination age should use their own judgment
and should educate themselves about the real dangers of this unscientific,
useless, harmful and invasive medical procedure. No matter how much vaccines
are pushed, vaccination is not compulsory in Australia (though the Liberal
Federal Minister for Health has announced his plan to make it so in the near
future-which, to me, sounded more like a threat at the time), and parents do
not have to vaccinate their children.
Those parents who think they are safe
when they follow the official propaganda may be in for a rude awakening:
they may be accused of causing the harm which resulted from vaccination.
I also urge medical practitioners to use their own judgment and
observations and study the trail of disaster created by vaccination. They
should listen when their patients and especially the parents of small
children report side effects of vaccinations.
The inability to listen and observe the truth has created a breed of medical
practitioners who inflict illness rather than healing, who become accusers
rather than helpers, and who are ultimately just covering up-whether
consciously or unknowingly, but with frighteningly increasing frequency-for
the disasters created by their useless and deadly concoctions and
sanctimonious ministrations.
Maybe the term "Munchausen boomerang" should be
introduced to describe those members of the medical profession who victimize
the victims of their own harmful interventions (vaccines in particular).
I would like to remind those who may still think the risks of vaccine injury
are outweighed by the benefits from vaccines, that infectious diseases are
beneficial for children by priming and maturing their immune system. These
diseases also represent developmental milestones.
Having measles not only
results in a lifelong specific immunity to measles, but also a non-specific
immunity to a host of other, more serious conditions: degenerative diseases
of bone and cartilage, certain tumors, skin diseases and immuno-reactive
diseases (Ronne, 198518). Having mumps has been found to protect against
ovarian cancer (West, 196619). So there is no need to try to prevent
children from getting infectious diseases.
Moreover, according to orthodox immunological research, vaccines do not
immunize, they sensitize; they make the recipients more susceptible to
diseases (Craighead, 197520). It is the vaccinated children who suffer
chronic ill health (asthma and constant ear infections being two of many
vaccine side effects); who develop side effects to diseases like pneumonia
or atypical measles (which carries a 12 to 15 per cent mortality risk); or
who may have difficulty going through even such innocuous diseases as
chicken pox because their immune system has been suppressed by vaccines.
In my closing remark, I urge parents to ask themselves a few questions.
-
Have
you noticed how much the vaccines are pushed by threats, coercion,
victimization and monetary punitive measures, with parents then being
accused of causing what are clearly side effects of the vaccines?
-
Would you
succumb to the same type of pressure if any other product were pushed with
the same vengeance?
-
Wouldn't you be suspicious and ask what's wrong with the
product if it has to be forced upon consumers?
-
Why do so many informed
parents, as well as many informed medical doctors, now refuse vaccination?
-
Shouldn't you be suspicious of a medical system which forces itself upon
you, which won't accept responsibility for vaccine injuries and unlawfully
tries to take away your constitutional, democratic and legal right to have
control over your own and your children's health without being hassled and
victimized?
Endnotes:
1. Caffey, J. (1972), "On the theory and practice of shaking infants", Am.
J. Dis. Child 124, August 1972.
2. Caffey, J. (1974), "The whiplash shaken infant syndrome: manual shaking
by the extremities with whiplash-induced intracranial and intraocular
bleeding, linked with residual permanent brain damage and mental
retardation", Pediatrics 54(4):396-403.
3. Reece, R. M. (1993), "Fatal child abuse and sudden infant death
syndrome", Pediatrics 91:423-429.
4. Duhaime, A. C., Alario, A. J., Lewander, W. J. et al. (1992), "Head
injury in very young children mechanisms, injury types and opthalmologic
findings in 100 hospitalized patients younger than two years of age",
Pediatrics 90(2):179-185.
5. Levine, S. and Sowinski, R. (1973), "Hyperacute allergic
encephalomyelitis", Am. J. Pathol. 73:247-260.
6. Iwasa, A., Ishida, S., Akama, K. (1985), "Swelling of the brain caused by
pertussis vaccine: its quantitative determination and the responsible
factors in the vaccine", Japan J. Med. Sci. Biol. 38:53-65.
7. Munoz, J. J., Aral, H., Bergman, R. K. and Sadowski, P. (1981),
"Biological activities of crystalline pertussigen from Bordetella pertussis",
Infection and Immunity, September 1981, pp. 820-826.
8. Wilkins, J. (1988), "What is 'significant' and DTP reactions" (letter),
Pediatrics 81(6):912-913.
9. Devin, F., Roques, G., Disdier, P., Rodor, F. and Weiller, P. J. (1996),
"Occlusion of central retinal vein after hepatitis B vaccination", Lancet
347:1626, 8 June 1996.
10. Goetting, M. G. and Sowa, B. (1990), "Retinal
hemorrhage after
cardiopulmonary resuscitation in children: an etiologic evaluation",
Pediatrics 85(4):585-588.
11. Jacob, J. and Mannino, F. (1979), "Increased intracranial pressure after
diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis immunization", Am. J. Dis. Child
133:217-218.
12. Woerner, S. J., Abildgaard, C. F. and French, B. N. (1981),
"Intracranial hemorrhage in children with idiopathic thrombocytopenic
purpura", Pediatrics 67(4):453-460.
13. Cody, C. L., Baraff, L. J., Cherry, J. D., Marcy, S. C. and Manclark
(1981), "Nature and rates of adverse reactions associated with DTP and DT
immunizations in infants and children", Pediatrics 68(5):650-660.
14. Meadow, R. (1995), "What is and what is not 'Munchausen syndrome per
proxy'?", Arch. Dis. Child 72:534-538.
15. Yawata, Makoto (1994), "Japan's troubles with measles-mumps-rubella
vaccine", Lancet 343:105-106, 8 January 1994.
16. Higson, N. (1995), "Evaluating the measles
immunization campaign",
British Medical Journal 311:62.
17. Wakefield, A. J., Murch, S. H., Anthony, A., Linnell, J. et al. (1998),
"Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis and pervasive
developmental disorder in children", Lancet 351:637-641, 28 February 1998.
18. Ronne, T. (1985), "Measles virus infection without rash in childhood is
related to disease in adult life", Lancet, 5 January 1985, pp. 1-5.
19. West, R. O. (1966), "Epidemiologic studies of malignancies of the
ovaries", Cancer, July 1966, pp. 1001-07.
20. Craighead, J. E. (1975), "Report of a workshop: disease accentuation
after immunization with inactivated microbial vaccines", J. Infect. Dis.
1312(6):749-754.
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