FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, March 25, 2011
Contact: Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota
Wayne Rohde 651-705-5030
Media Measles Reporting Biased and Incorrect
ST. PAUL, MN – Media reporting on Minnesota’s recent handful of measles cases is biased and incorrect, says local consumer advocacy group Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota.
Parents of vaccine-injured children once again are asking what happened to objective investigative journalism, when reporters acted as watchdogs for all consumers rather than lapdogs repeating government and industry memos. Instead TV and newspaper articles seem calculated to create fear and coercion rather than inform consumers.
Many Minnesota Somali parents report that their children regressed physically and mentally, often with seizures, immediately after receiving an MMR vaccine. However the Minnesota Department of Health is not visiting families to investigate and provide medical care for these sick children. Instead MDH is merely conducting statistical calculations, at a glacial pace.
MMR vaccine efficacy problems are well documented in medical literature. A 1994 Archives of Internal Medicine article by the Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Gregory Poland noted the “Apparent Paradox of Measles Infections in Immunized Persons”: “Despite these high rates of immunization, 30% to 100% (mean, 77%) of all measles cases in these outbreaks occurred in previously immunized students.”
MMR vaccine injuries are well documented by the U.S. government in its Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). On July 20, 2007 the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program ruled that the MMR alone had caused autism in Bailey Banks — “both caused-in-fact and proximately caused by his vaccination.”
Because the MMR vaccine has harmed a significant number of children worldwide, many parents are justifiably wary of vaccinating – regardless of ethnicity, education or other sociological factors.
A responsive government would continuously update vaccine policy to be consumer friendly, resulting in more babies vaccinated. The Centers for Disease Control and MDH must start accepting all vaccine consumer input, rather than denying documented adverse events.
“Every child deserves safe vaccines,” said Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota spokesperson Jennifer VanDerHorst-Larson. “If vaccines are causing injury, it’s unscientific, unethical and inhumane to let those injuries continue.”
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QUESTIONS REPORTERS SHOULD ASK:
- Can the Minnesota Department of Health verify the strain of measles in the index case? Is it consistent with the other reported cases?
- Can MDH confirm those children reported to be unvaccinated actually ARE NOT vaccinated, or is that just an assumption?
- Can MDH confirm that any of the children who have been diagnosed with measles were actually vaccinated?
- Since it has been a very long time since most of the doctors have seen measles, are the reported cases been lab-confirmed by the CDC as measles? Or are they rashes and/or other medical conditions?
- Ask MDH why Merck will not supply single-dose vials of measles, mumps or rubella vaccines that consumers are demanding instead of the triple combination known as the MMR.
- Ask MDH to produce safety studies showing that multiple vaccines given at the same time are indeed safe for infants and toddlers.
- Ask MDH to produce safety studies showing that it is safe to repeat the MMR only one month after the first dose.
- Ask MDH whether they encourage parents who report that their child was harmed by the vaccine to give them a second dose.
- Ask MDH whether they encourage parents of vaccine-injured children to vaccinate their other children.
- Ask MDH whether they take parents’ reports seriously that their child was harmed. Is MDH making efforts to listen to these stories and learn how to prevent vaccine injuries, or is MDH ignoring them or providing patronizing denials of their truth – thus putting those families and others at increased risk?
- Ask MDH why they insist on a one-size-fits-all vaccination schedule, and resist shot schedules spaced out to accommodate individual children’s tolerances.