There is a better than even chance that if you ask someone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO) or your family physician who first discovered the poliovirus and when they did it, they would have a hard time coming up with the right answer. The answer, by the way, is Karl Landsteiner, MD and Erwin Popper, MD of Austria in 1908.1 2
At the same time, it is unlikely many at the CDC, WHO or most medical doctors would be able to tell you the name of the person who came up with the theory of “herd immunity,” which serves as the foundational basis for justifying mandatory vaccination campaigns. The name of that person is Dr. Arthur W. Hedrich, a health officer in Chicago, Illinois. He observed that, “during 1900-1930, outbreaks of measles in Boston, MA appeared to be suppressed when 68 percent of the children contracted the virus.”3
Later in the 1930s, Hedrich observed that after 55 percent of the child population in Baltimore, MD contracted measles the rest of the city’s population appeared to be immune to the disease. It was these observations that led to the formulation of the herd immunity theory.3 But note that the theory was based on unvaccinated populations that were exposed to the disease and developed natural immunity to it. The protection came from the fact that each population was exposed to the disease and a certain percentage of the people got it.
The original theory of herd immunity had nothing to do with vaccination. The first mass vaccination campaigns for polio and measles in the United States, for example, did not occur until 1954-1955 and 1963 respectively.4 5 6 That’s three decades after Hedrich constructed his theory. The underlying assumption of the theory was that a community as a whole would develop a certain degree of natural protection from an infectious disease after a portion of its members actually came down with the disease, recovered from it, and became immune to it.
In other words:
The more members of the herd (community) who were exposed to an infectious disease and developed natural immunity to it, the less of a threat that disease posed to the entire herd (community).7
Somewhere along the line between the 1930s and 1950s the theory of herd immunity was corrupted and resurrected as:
The more members of a herd (community) who were vaccinated against an infectious disease and developed immunity to it, the less of a threat that disease posed to the entire herd (community).
Notice the clever sleight of hand there. Suddenly, the importance of exposure to an infectious disease was eliminated and replaced with vaccination, and the importance of natural immunity was diminished. That’s a problem, because both of those elements are key to Hedrich’s theory. Hedrich was not thinking about a vaccinated community or vaccine-induced—“temporary”—artificial immunity when he thought up his theory. He was thinking about the process of how a disease works its way through a community and how that community, eventually, naturally builds up a resistance to it as a result.
Dr. Hedrich would not recognize his theory today. He would likely be the first to speak up and say, “Uh, no, that’s not at all what I had in mind. You missed the central point.”
Just about anyone with the equivalent of a high school education can answer the question, “Who developed the theory of relativity.” Einstein, of course. The theory is central to the science of physics. Although some have tried to question it, no scientist or professor of physics of any note would dare try to misrepresent or redefine it.
Yet, ask any public health official or health care professional involved in giving vaccinations to correctly explain the theory of herd immunity and who developed it, many would probably fail on both counts. Why? Because they have not made an honest effort to study the history of the theory. They have erroneously accepted as truth the relatively new myth promoted by public health officials around the world that herd immunity can only be attained through a highly vaccinated population and that every unvaccinated individual threatens the health of and weakens the herd.
Hedrich’s theory of herd immunity has been twisted by the myth that vaccine acquired artificial immunity is identical to naturally acquired immunity, which is false. That myth serves to perpetuate the idea that only strict enforcement of mandatory vaccination laws will protect society from disease, which is also false.
References:
Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?
“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposium—on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last week—touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.
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The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.
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Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no one is incentivised to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative. Would a Hippocratic Oath for science help? Certainly don’t add more layers of research red-tape. Instead of changing incentives, perhaps one could remove incentives altogether. Or insist on replicability statements in grant applications and research papers. Or emphasise collaboration, not competition. Or insist on preregistration of protocols. Or reward better pre and post-publication peer review. Or improve research training and mentorship. Or implement the recommendations from our Series on increasing research value, published last year. One of the most convincing proposals came from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following several high-profile errors, the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. Weidberg worried we set the bar for results in biomedicine far too low. In particle physics, significance is set at 5 sigma—a p value of 3 × 10–7 or 1 in 3·5 million (if the result is not true, this is the probability that the data would have been as extreme as they are). The conclusion of the symposium was that something must be done. Indeed, all seemed to agree that it was within our power to do that something. But as to precisely what to do or how to do it, there were no firm answers. Those who have the power to act seem to think somebody else should act first. And every positive action (eg, funding well-powered replications) has a counterargument (science will become less creative). The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously. The bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.
Richard Horton richard.h orton@lancet.com
1380 http://www.thelancet.com Vol 385 April 11, 2015
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Posted in Admin Comment, The lancet
Tagged Allopathic medical problems, Vaccines