by Peter Holleran, DC
A
medical study published in 2015 in the new England Journal of Medicine suggests the practice of giving infants small doses of peanut butter at an early age in order to desensitize them from later peanut allergy and life-threatening anaphylactic shock. Peanut allergy has become widespread today, affecting over 1.5 million kids. Prior to the 1950's it was rare, but like childhood cancers, type-1-diabetes, asthma, and autism, since the doubling and
quadrupling (from 1980 to today) of the number of vaccinations given to children in this country, its rate has skyrocketed. The following article by Dr. Tim O'Shea [with my comments in
bold] traces the likely cause of this epidemic to the common use of peanut oil, containing trace amounts of peanut protein, as an excipient in vaccines - which then through known mechanisms of anaphylaxis sets up the body for a later hyper-reaction to ingestion of peanuts. The same mechanism is apparently involved in allergy to penicillin.
If this is the case, the suggestion of the new study may fail in many cases, given that children are already vaccinated early and heavily - twenty or more vaccinations in the first year of life - possibly too late for those vulnerable to avoid a negative reaction to peanuts. It is worthy of note that the study said that the ages of 4 to 11 months may be the window of opportunity for this strategy to work; this just may be because older children will have had far too many vaccines (up to 50 by the time of entering kindergarten) for such attempts at desensitization to be effective. (Of course, these researchers did not admit this as a possibility. Some may view the conclusions of this study, however plausible, as another diversion from anything that would cast doubt on the safety of vaccines).
What, then, can a parent do? It's a difficult problem. Here are some possible suggestions to consider: help maximize the functioning of the immune and nervous systems through regular chiropractic adjustments; increase Vitamin C intake to multi-gram levels to help counteract the effect of toxins in the body, as well as support adrenal function; avoid the offending substances as much as possible; and find a medical doctor who will work with you to minimize your child's vaccine exposure (such principled and courageous doctors are hard to find, but they do exist; despite the now-endangered personal/philosophical vaccine exemption, medical exemptions still exist and likely will always exist). If the 1950's generation got by fine with 5 vaccinations, and the 1980 generation made it through with only 20 (still the average level in Europe today), do you really think the present generation needs all 70 (and counting) that the pharmaceutical-vaccine-industry/FDA recommends?
Dr. Mercola suggests, for those who want to try this new procedure:
"Ideally, work with your pediatrician and get an allergy test to ascertain susceptibility to peanut allergy first, and then start out with minute amounts if the risk of allergy is low. Some women are still advised to avoid peanuts during pregnancy as well, and here I believe there’s far less potential risks involved, and eating peanuts during pregnancy (provided you’re not allergic), may be a safer way to go."
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A sure starting point to dealing with what is not understood is to get educated. Read Dr. O'Shea's article:
Vaccines and the Peanut Allergy Epidemic
– Dr Tim O’Shea
Have you ever wondered why so many kids these days are allergic to peanuts? Where did this allergy come from all of a sudden?
Before 1900, reactions to peanuts were unheard of. Today almost a 1.5 million children in this country are allergic to peanuts.
What happened? Why is everybody buying EpiPens now? Looking at all the problems with vaccines during the past decade, [2] just a superficial awareness is enough to raise the suspicion that vaccines might have some role in the appearance of any novel allergy among children.
But reactions to peanuts are not just another allergy. Peanut allergy has suddenly emerged as the #1 cause of death from food reactions, being in a category of allergens able to cause anaphylaxis. This condition brings the risk of asthma attack, shock, respiratory failure, and even death. Primarily among children.
Sources cited in Heather Fraser’s 2011 book The Peanut Allergy Epidemic suggest a vaccine connection much more specifically. We learn that a class of vaccine adjuvants – excipients – is a likely suspect in what may accurately be termed an epidemic. [1]
But let’s back up a little. We have to look at both vaccines and antibiotics in recent history, and the physical changes the ingredients in these brand new medicines introduced into the blood of children.
ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK AND ALLERGY
Before 1900, anaphylactic shock was virtually unknown. The syndrome of sudden fainting, respiratory distress, convulsions, and sometimes death did not exist until vaccinators switched from the lancet to the hypodermic needle. That transformation was essentially complete by the turn of the century in the western world.
Right at that time, a new disease called Serum Sickness began to afflict thousands of children. A variety of symptoms, including shock, fainting, and sometimes death, could suddenly result following an injection.
Instead of covering it up, the connection was well recognized and documented in the medical literature of the day. Dr Clemens Von Pirquet, who actually coined the word “allergy,” was a leading researcher in characterizing the new disease. [5] Serum Sickness was the first mass allergenic phenomenon in history. What had been required for its onset, apparently, was the advent of the hypodermic needle.
When the needle replaced the lancet in the late 1800s, Serum Sickness soon became a frequent visitor to the child’s bed. It was a known consequence of vaccinations. Indeed, the entire field of modern allergy has evolved from the early study of Serum Sickness coming from vaccines.
VACCINE HYPERSENSITIVITY
Von Pirquet recognized that vaccines had 2 primary effects: immunity and hypersensitivity. [5] He said they were inseparable: the one was the price of the other.
In other words, if we were going to benefit from the effects of mass immunization, we must accept the downside of mass hypersensitivity as a necessary co-feature. Modern medicine has decided that this double effect should be kept secret, so they don’t allow it to be brought up much.
Many doctors in the early 1900s were dead set against vaccines for this precise reason. The advertised benefit was not proven to be worth the risk. Doctors like Walter Hadwen MD, Wm. Howard Hay, and Alfred Russell Wallace saw how smallpox vaccines had actually increased the incidence of smallpox. [2,3] Wallace was one of the principal epidemiologists of the age, and his charts showing the increase in smallpox death from vaccination are unassailable – meticulous primary sources.
Another landmark researcher of the early 1900s was Dr Charles Richet, the one who coined the term anaphylaxis. [4] Richet focused on the reactions that some people seemed to have to certain foods. He found that with food allergies, the reaction came on as the result of intact proteins in the food having bypassed the digestive system and making their way intact into the blood, via leaky gut.
Foreign protein in the blood, of course, is a universal trigger for allergic reaction, not just in man but in all animals. [6]
But Richet noted that in the severe cases, food anaphylaxis did not happen just by eating a food. That would simply be food poisoning.
Food anaphylaxis is altogether different. This sudden, violent reaction requires an initial sensitization involving injection of some sort, followed by a later ingestion of the sensitized food. Get the shot, then later eat the food. [
IMPORTANT]
The initial exposure creates the hypersensitivity. The second exposure would be the violent, perhaps fatal, physical event.
Richet’s early work around 1900 was primarily with eggs, meat, milk and diphtheria proteins. Not peanuts. The value of Richet’s research with reactive foods was to teach us the sequence of allergic sensitivity leading to anaphylaxis, how that had to take place.
Soon other doctors began to notice striking similarities between food reactions and the serum sickness that was associated with vaccines. Same exact clinical presentation.
PENICILLIN
Next up was penicillin, which became popular in the 1940s. It was soon found that additives called excipients were necessary to prolong the effect of the antibiotic injected into the body. The excipients would act as carrier molecules. Without excipients, the penicillin would only last about 2 hours. Refined oils worked best, acting as time-release capsules for the antibiotic.
Peanut oil became the favorite, because it worked well, and was available and inexpensive.
Allergy to penicillin became common, and was immediately recognized as a sensitivity to the excipient oils. To the present day, that’s why they always ask if you’re allergic to penicillin. The allergy is a sensitivity to the excipients.
By 1953 as many as 12% of the population was allergic to penicillin. [1] But considering the upside with life-threatening bacterial infections, it was still a good deal – a worthwhile risk.
By 1950 antibiotics were being given out like M&Ms. Soldiers, children, anybody with any illness, not just bacterial. Despite Alexander Fleming’s severe warnings against prophylactic antibiotics, antibiotics were given indiscriminately as the new wonder drug. Just in case anything. [7] Only then, in the 1950s, did peanut allergy begin to occur, even though Americans had been eating peanuts for well over a century.
Remember – just eating peanuts cannot cause peanut allergy. Except if they are allowed to become moldy of course, in which case aflatoxins are released. But that’s really not a peanut allergy. When peanut allergy did appear, the numbers of cases were fairly small and initially it wasn’t even considered worthy of study.
THE RISE OF VACCINES
The big change came with vaccines. Peanut oils were introduced as vaccine excipients in the mid 1960s. An article appeared in the NY Times on 18 Sept, 1964 that would never be printed today. [8] The author described how a newly patented ingredient containing peanut oil was added as an adjuvant to a new flu vaccine, in order to prolong the “immunity.” The oil was reported to act as a time release capsule, and theoretically enhanced the vaccine’s strength. Same mechanism as with penicillin.
That new excipient, though not approved in the US, became the model for subsequent vaccines. ([1] p 103)
By 1980 peanut oil had become the preferred excipient in vaccines, even though the dangers were well documented. [9] It was considered an adjuvant – a substance able to increase reactivity to the vaccine. This reinforced the Adjuvant Myth: the illusion that immune response is the same as immunity [2]. The pretense here is that the stronger the allergic response to the vaccine, the greater will be the immunity that is conferred. This fundamental error is consistent throughout vaccine literature of the past century. [
NOTE: this means here that simply having the body react strongly to the toxic irritation by mercury, aluminum, peanut oil, etc., has nothing to do with producing an anti-body response and enhancing immunity from disease. They used to do the same thing with injections for the treatment of secondary syphilis, and what happened? It caused tertiary syphilis!]. Historically, researchers who challenged this Commandment of vaccine mythology did not advance their careers.
KEEPING PEANUT ADJUVANTS A SECRET
The first study of peanut allergies was not undertaken until 1973. It was a study of peanut excipients in vaccines. Soon afterwards, and as a result of the attention from that study, manufacturers were no longer required to disclose all the ingredients in vaccines. [
NOTE: wasn't that convenient?]
What is listed in the Physicians Desk Reference in each vaccine section is not the full formula. Same with the inserts. Suddenly after 1973, that detailed information was proprietary: the manufacturers knew it must be protected. Intellectual property. So now they only were required to describe the formula in general.
Why was peanut allergy so violent? Adjuvant pioneer Maurice Hilleman claimed peanut oil adjuvants had all protein removed by refining. [9] The FDA disagreed. They said some peanut protein traces would always persist [10]- that even the most refined peanut oils still contained some traces of intact peanut proteins. This was the reason doctors were directed to inject vaccines intramuscular rather than intravenous – a greater chance of absorption of intact proteins, less chance of reaction.
But all their secret research obviously wasn’t enough to prevent sensitivity. Mother Nature bats last: no intact proteins in the body. 60 million years of Natural Selection didn’t create the mammalian immune system for nothing. Put intact proteins, peanut or whatever, for any imagined reason into the human system and the inflammatory response will fire. And since the goal of oil emulsion adjuvants was to prolong reactivity in the first place – the notion of time-release – this led to sensitization.
PEANUT ALLERGY EPIDEMIC
Although peanut allergies became fairly common during the 1980s, it wasn’t until the early 1990s when there was a sudden surge of children reacting to peanuts – the true epidemic appeared. What changed? The Mandated Schedule of vaccines for children doubled from the 80s to the 90s:
1980 – 20 vaccines
1995 – 40 vaccines
2011 – 68 vaccines
It would be imprudent enough to feed peanuts to a newborn, since the digestive system is largely unformed. But this is much worse – injecting intact proteins directly into the infant’s body. In 36 vaccines before the age of 18 months.
A new kind of anaphylaxis appeared with peanut reactions: reverse anaphylaxis. (p 172, [1]) The reaction was not only to the sensitizing antigen, but to the weird new antibodies that had just been introduced in the human species by the new antigen. Without the usual benefit of the evolutionary process.
As vaccines doubled between the 1980s and the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of kids were now exhibiting peanut sensitivities, with frequent cases of anaphylaxis reactions, sometimes fatal.
But nobody talked about it.
Following the next enormous increase in vaccines on the Mandated Schedule after 9/11, whereby the total shot up to 68 recommended vaccines, the peanut allergy soon reached epidemic proportions: a million children: 1.5% of them. These numbers fit the true definition of epidemic even though that word has never been used in mainstream literature with respect to peanut allergy, except in Fraser’s odd little book. Many researchers, not just Heather Fraser, could see very clearly that
“The peanut allergy epidemic in children was precipitated by childhood injections.” ( [1], p 106)
But with the newfound research, the medical profession will do what they always must do – bury it. Protect the companies. So no money will be ever allocated from NIH to study the obvious connection between vaccine excipients and peanut allergy. That cannot happen, primarily because it would require a control group – an unvaccinated population. And that is the Unspoken Forbidden.
Same line of reasoning that has prevented Wakefield’s work from ever being replicated in a mainstream US clinical study. No unvaccinated populations. Which actually means no studies whose outcome could possibly implicate vaccines as a source of disease or immunosuppression. Vaccines as a cause of an allergy epidemic? Impossible. Let’s definitely not study it.
Instead let’s spend the next 20 years looking for the Genetic Link to the childhood peanut allergy epidemic…
In such a flawed system, any pretense of true clinical science is revealed as fatally handicapped of course: we are looking for the truth, wherever our studies shall take us, except for this, and this, and oh yes, this.
Evidence for the connection between peanut excipients and vaccines is largely indirect today, because of the circling of the wagons by the manufacturers. It is very difficult to find peanut excipients listed in the inserts and PDR listings of vaccines. Simple liability.
FRAME OF REFERENCE
So in addition to all the other problems with vaccines delineated in our text, now we have a new one – peanut oil excipients. Which all by themselves can cause severe, even fatal, episodes of shock, as well as chronic allergy – irrespective of the mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, and the attenuated pathogens which the manufacturers do admit to.
Quite a toxic burden to saddle the unprotected newborn with. No wonder the US Supreme Court refers to vaccines as “unavoidably unsafe.”
Childhood allergies doubled between 1980 and 2000, and have doubled again since that time. [11] Theories abound. Childhood vaccines doubled at the same time. Why is there a virtual blackout of viable discussion about this glaring fact?
The epidemic of peanut allergy is just one facet of this much broader social phenomenon. We have the sickest, most allergic kids of any country, industrialized or not, on Earth. A study of the standard literature of vaccines is identical to a study of the history of adjuvants – an exercise in cover-up and dissimulation. Unvaccinated children don’t become autistic. And they don’t go into shock from eating peanuts.
But there can never be a formal clinical study where the control group is unvaccinated. NIH would never do that. They cannot. They know the outcome.
[
NOTE: while such studies are never done, a common method of distorting data in vaccine studies is by claiming to be a placebo controlled study, but not using a true placebo! Rather, a 'placebo' is used that contains one or more of the same offending ingredients as in the vaccine. For example, they might have one group getting a vaccine containing aluminum, and another getting a placebo also containing aluminum. This way they can conclude that a vaccine is less dangerous than it really is. Clever, eh? There are ever increasing examples of drug companies omitting the publishing of negative clinical trial results, and the FDA knowing about but also .ignoring them, with drugs staying on the market without any change on the label. This is known as publication bias, and it is a continuing problem, a case of 'business-as-usual' by the industry.
In addition, and in reality, a devious and prefect catch-22 situation is created by insisting on random, double-blind, placebo controlled studies for any group showing impressive clinical findings for something not owned, controlled' or accepted by the pharmaceutical industry, but withholding the funds to do such an expensive study - while totally ignoring outstanding clinical results. Moreover, such studies are NOT the usual way many or most of the drugs on the market are approved. Aspirin would not be legal today if it had to pass such scrutiny. An example of how ridiculous this is can be seen as follows. If you shot 500 people through the heart with a gun, and they all died, that would not be 'proof' that they died from a gunshot wound. You would first have to have a control population and do a random double-blind placebo controlled study! The same situation would apply if, say, 500 people taking mega-doses of Vitamin C all cured their viral infection, that would not be considered proof for the effectiveness of large amounts of Vitamin C (a real example: Dr. Klenner in 1949 cured 60 out of 60 polio cases in 72 hours with 200 grams of Vitamin C a day; he was ignored by the medical establishment).
And not only is the so-called 'gold standard' of this kind of study (which has a legitimate use, but is not the only way medical discovery is made) - not only is it used to prevent the finding of new medical advances, but the notion of 'peer review' is also used to the same end: protecting the interests of the trade group (AMA, AAP, etc.) whose financial livelihood is at stake. For there is no safeguard against peer 'group bias', i.e., when all of the peers believe in the same paradigm and are predisposed to reject any evidence that would cast doubt on it. This means that if the researchers already 'know' vaccines work and have no risks, then studies will be skewed to proving a point rather than discovering the truth. For example, after the famous Simpsonwood and IOM meetings on the use of mercury in vaccines, with expert after expert presenting indisputable evidence against it, the CDC directed its researchers to 'find a way to disprove this'. But honest scientific studies are not to be made with the purpose of disproving anything - they are to find out what is really happening. This honesty is sorely lacking in an industry where the conflicts of interest are so great.]
References
1. Fraser, H, The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, Skyhorse 2011
2. O’Shea, T, Vaccination Is Not Immunization, thedoctorwithin 2013
3. Wallace, AR, Vaccine Delusion, 1898
4. Richet, C, Nobel lecture, acceptance speech, 11 Dec 1913
Nobel Lectures Physiology or Medicine 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1913/richet-lecture.html
5. Von Pirquet, C, MD, On the theory of infectious disease
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Volume 80, January 1987
6. O’Shea, T, Allergies: the threshold of reactivity
www.thedoctorwithin.com/allergies/Allergies-The-Threshold-of-Reactivity/
7. O’Shea, T, The post antibiotic age
www.thedoctorwithin.com/antibiotics/Post-Antibiotic-Age/
8. Jones, S, Peanut oil used in a new vaccine New York Times 18 Sep 13
9. HOBSON, D, MD, The potential role of immunological adjuvants
in influenza vaccines Postgraduate Medical Journal March 1973 , no. 49, p 180.
http://pmj.bmj.com/content/49/569/180.full.pdf
9. Technical Report # 595, Immunological Adjuvants, World Health Org. 1976.
http://whqlibdoc.who.int/trs/WHO_TRS_595.pdf
10. FDA: March 2006. Approaches to Establish Thresholds for Major Food Allergens
www.fda.gov/downloads/food/labelingnutrition/foodallergenslabeling/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinformation/ucm192048.pdf
11. O’Shea, T, The threshold of reactivity
www.thedoctorwithin.com/allergies/Allergies-The-Threshold-of-Reactivity/
