Vaccination against Whooping Cough

May 10, 2024 by Doctor Vernon Coleman

Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s I was a passionate critic of a number of vaccines - most notably the whooping cough vaccine.

The story of the whooping cough vaccine provides us with a remarkable example of dishonesty and deceit in medicine.

There has been controversy about the whooping cough vaccine for many years but in the UK, the Department of Health and Social Security has consistently managed to convince the majority of medical and nursing staff to support the official line that the vaccine is both safe and effective. The official line has for years paid little attention to the facts. Put bluntly, successive governments have consistently lied about the risks and problems associated with the whooping cough vaccine.

I will explain exactly why I think that governments have lied to their employers (the public) a little later. For the time being I would like to concentrate on the history.

The first point that should be made is that although official spokesmen claim otherwise, I don’t believe the whooping cough vaccine has ever had a significant influence on the number of children dying from whooping cough. The dramatic fall in the number of deaths caused by the disease came well before the vaccine was widely available and was, historians agree, the result of improved public health measures and the use of antibiotics.

It was in 1957 that the whooping cough vaccine was first introduced nationally in Britain – although the vaccine was tried out in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. But the incidence of whooping cough, and the number of children dying from the disease, had both fallen very considerably well before 1957. So, for example, while doctors reported 170,000 cases of whooping cough in 1950, they reported only about 80,000 cases in 1955. The introduction of the vaccine really didn't make very much, if any, difference to the fall in the incidence of the disease. Thirty years after the introduction of the vaccine, whooping cough cases were still running at about 1,000 a week in Britain.

Similarly, the figures show that the introduction of the vaccine had no effect on the number of children dying from whooping cough. The mortality rate associated with the disease had been falling appreciably since the early part of the 20th century and rapidly since the 1930s and 1940s – showing a particularly steep decline after the introduction of the sulphonamide drugs. Whooping cough is undoubtedly an extremely unpleasant disease but it has not been a major killer for many years. Successive governments have frequently forecast fresh whooping cough epidemics but none of the forecast epidemics has produced the devastation predicted.

My second point is that the whooping cough vaccine is neither very efficient nor is it safe. The efficiency of the vaccine is of subsidiary interest – although thousands of children who have been vaccinated do still get the disease – for the greatest controversy surrounds the safety of the vaccine. The DHSS has always claimed that serious adverse reactions to the whooping cough vaccine are extremely rare and the official suggestion has been that the risk of a child being brain damaged by the vaccine is no higher than one in 100,000. Leaving aside the fact that I find a risk of one in 100,000 unacceptable, it is interesting to examine this figure a little more closely, for after a little research work it becomes clear that the figure of one in 100,000 is a guess.

Numerous researchers have studied the risks of brain damage following whooping cough vaccination and their results make fascinating reading. Between 1960 and 1981, for example, nine reports were published showing that the risk of brain damage varied between one in 6,000 and one in 100,000. The average was a risk of one in 50,000. It is clear from these figures that the Government simply chose the figure which showed the whooping cough vaccine to be least risky. Moreover, the one in 100,000 figure was itself an estimate – a guess.

Although the British Government consistently claims that whooping cough is a dangerous disease, the figures show that it is not the indiscriminate killer it is made out to be. Whooping cough causes very few deaths a year in Britain. Many more deaths are caused by tuberculosis and meningitis.

The truth about the whooping cough vaccine is that it has, in the past, been a disaster. The vaccine has been withdrawn in some countries because of the amount of brain damage associated with its use. In Japan, Sweden and West Germany the vaccine has, in the past, been omitted from regular vaccination schedules. In America, some years ago, two out of three whooping cough vaccine manufacturers stopped making the vaccine because of the cost of lawsuits. On 6th December 1985 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a major report showing that the whooping cough vaccine was, without doubt, linked to the development of serious brain damage.

The final nail in the coffin lid is the fact that the British Government quietly paid out compensation to the parents of hundreds of children who had been brain damaged by the whooping cough vaccine. Some parents who accepted damages in the early years were given £10,000. Later the sum was raised to £20,000.

My startling conclusion is that for many years now the whooping cough vaccine has been killing or severely injuring more children than the disease itself. In the decade after 1979, around 800 children (or their parents) received money from the Government as compensation for vaccine produced brain damage. In the same period, less than 100 children were killed by whooping cough. I think that made the vaccine more dangerous than the disease. And that, surely is quite unacceptable. So, why did the British Government continue to encourage doctors to use the vaccine?

There are two possible explanations. The first explanation is the more generous of the two and concerns the Government's responsibility for the health of the community as a whole. The theory here is that by encouraging millions of parents to have their children vaccinated, the Government can reduce the incidence of the disease in the community. In the long run this (theoretically) reduces the risk of there being any future epidemics of whooping cough. In other words, the Government risks the lives of individual children for the good of the next generation.

The second, less charitable explanation is that the British Government was looking after its own interests by continuing to claim that the whooping cough vaccine was safe enough to use. If the British Government had withdrawn the whooping cough vaccine, it would have been admitting that the vaccine was dangerous. And it would obviously have had to pay out a great deal of money in compensation. By a good deal I mean billions. Lots of billions.

Whatever explanation you consider most accurate, the unavoidable fact is that the Government has, in the past, consistently lied about the whooping cough vaccine, has distorted the truth and has deceived both the medical profession (for the majority of doctors and nurses who give these injections accept the recommendations made by the Government without question) and millions of parents.

The British Government may have saved itself a tidy sum in damages. But the cost to the nation's health has been enormous.

And today no one with anything resembling a functioning brain believes anything the Government says about vaccines or, indeed, anything else.

The whooping cough vaccine used to be given to older children but young babies (who had not been vaccinated) still died from the disease (although the so-called experts claimed that by giving the vaccine to older children the disease would be eradicated and babies would not get it). So now they give the vaccine to eight-week-old babies and hope not too many of them die and that when babies do die no one can prove it's the vaccine.

How many children will be killed by the vaccine? Will Arsenal win the 2020 FA Cup? Will Tony Blair ever be imprisoned for war crimes? These are all imponderables. For the answers, we must wait.

NOTE

The above essay was taken from Vernon Coleman’s international bestselling book `Anyone who tells you vaccines are safe and effective is lying’ which was published in 2011. Numerous attempts have been made to ban this book which is already banned in some parts of the world. Joe Biden’s White House objected to the book being on sale. The book is available from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com Just CLICK HERE