Shot in the Dark

Excerpt:

Today, nearly all our children get the DPT shot- D for diphtheria, P for pertussis, or whooping cough, and T for tetanus. These three different vaccines are combined into one shot to combat three dreaded diseases that have , in past centuries, caused children to die or become permanently handicapped.

We have been taught to believe in the wisdom of vaccination. But how much do parents, or even scientists and doctors, really know about the crippling side effects of vaccines? Particularly in the case of the pertussis vaccine, which is supposed to protect against whooping cough, are we giving our children a shot in the dark?

In the history of immunization, no vaccine has been as controversial as the one for pertussis. It was designed to wipe out ravaging whooping cough epidemics that invaded turn-of-the-century homes and sometimes claimed the lives of every child in the household. Since its development in the mid-1930s and its widespread use in the late 1950s, the pertussis vaccine has been denounced and praised with equal zeal by scientist and doctors in both America and Europe.

For the past half century, there have been repeated reports by parents and medical researchers that children were being permanently injured by the whooping cough vaccine and left with medication-resistant convulsions, mental retardation, and physical handicaps. There have been indications, although most government health authorities and members of the medical establishment hotly deny them, that one cause of the feared and unexplained Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is the pertussis vaccine administered to our newborns at two, four, and at six months of age. Other researchers have theorized that the more subtle forms of damage caused by the vaccine may include varying degrees of learning disabilities and hyperactivity , although these suggestions also have been vehemently denied by most physicians.