Diseases

Shingles Goes Epidemic: Chicken Pox Vax to Blame

Chicken pox vax gives little protection, kills & maims many, and treatment may kill children who’d have lived through the disease. So more children probably die now from vaccines & chicken pox than died of chicken pox before modern medicine. Worse, the vaccine may be triggering a new epidemic of shingles.

by Heidi Stevenson

Shingles is rapidly becoming epidemic, and the indirect cause is the chicken pox vaccine. Since shingles is the reemergence of chicken pox, that does seem counterintuitive. Nonetheless, the facts do prove the connection.

Once they enter your body, chicken pox viruses never leave. It doesn’t matter whether the virus entered by natural infection or by injection of a live attenuated virus in a vaccine. The virus, called varicella, hides in the central nervous system along a nerve root, and any nerve root will do. Normally, that’s not a big problem—but the situation is changing.

Historically, a few people would develop shingles, generally during a period of stress or reduced immune system function. In those cases, the varicella virus moves outward along the nerve root to whatever area of the body is served by it. It causes a rash, which is quite painful and usually lasts around a month. Most people never have a second bout of shingles.

Chicken Pox

Before the chicken pox vaccine, most children got the disease by the age of ten. In the US, about 3.7 million children would get chicken pox every year. About 50 children would die of the disease, and virtually all were immunocompromised. While the death of any child is sad, the reality is that the mortality rate in children was only 0.00135 percent. This doesn’t even come close to a life-threatening epidemic.

On the other hand, adults who get chicken pox have a complication rate of 20%, including pneumonia, bacterial infections, and brain inflammations. Each year, about 50 adults would die of chicken pox prior to the vaccine. Therefore, it was clearly preferable to deal with chicken pox during childhood.

While it’s true that we see less chicken pox than before, it still does happen. While the usual claim is that the vaccine is over 70% effective, the reality appears to be significantly less than that, perhaps as low as 40%. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) state that they don’t really know how common chicken pox now is, but:

Chickenpox outbreaks continue to occur even in settings such as schools where most children are vaccinated with one dose.^[2]

Clearly, the vaccine is not very effective. Of course, the response is typical. They’ve added another dose to the schedule.

A Developing Shingles Epidemic

But there’s an even darker side to this picture: shingles. Shingles is a far more serious condition. At a minimum, it causes a rash along the path that a nerve root serves, along with severe pain that lasts for around a month. Mercola reports that it can also lead to “bacterial skin infections, Hutchinson’s sign, Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, motor neuropathy, meningitis, hearing loss, blindness, and bladder impairment”^[1].

Now shingles is increasing. Worse, we’re seeing children get it. Though it’s still rare in them, the fact is that children virtually never suffered from shingles until the chicken pox vaccine was implemented.

But why would shingles be increasing, with even children succumbing, when there’s a chicken pox vaccine? It turns out, as documented by the statistical analysis of Gary S. Goldman^[3], that exposure to children with chicken pox boosts one’s immunity to shingles.The mechanism isn’t known, but the protection is real.

The UK’s Public Health Laboratory Service has found that adults who live with children and are exposed to chicken pox as a result receive protection against shingles^[4]. In other words, exposure to active cases of chicken pox results in a boost to the immune system’s ability to prevent shingles attacks.

Now that children are getting chicken pox less often, the adults in their lives are unlikely to come into contact with active chicken pox. The result is more and more shingles, with all the pain and adverse effects entailed.

Risks of Chicken Pox Vaccine

Chicken pox and shingles vaccines carry serious risks. As Dr. Mercola points out^[1], between March 1995 and July 1998, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) reported 6.574 adverse events associated with chicken pox. That’s about 1 adverse event for every 1.481 vaccinations.

About 4% of those reports resulted in severe adverse effects, including ”shock, encephalitis (brain inflammation), and thrombocytopenia (a blood disorder)”^[1]. 14 deaths were reported.

In all likelihood, at most only 10% of all adverse reactions to vaccines are reported to VAERS. That brings the total number of deaths from the vaccine to a more probable 140 in a little over four years, which approaches the number of child deaths attributed to chicken pox prior to vaccination.

When you also factor in the fact that many vaccinated children and adults still get chicken pox, it becomes apparent that the vaccine is providing little or no benefit. It may even be resulting in more deaths, not fewer.

But the truth is even murkier. Dr. Mercola brilliantly explains in “Chicken Pox: Why Do Children Die?”^[5] that many of the deaths attributed to chicken pox may very well be the result of medical treatment, not the disease! He investigated three CDC reports of deaths purportedly the result of the disease. However, what he found was that the children received treatment when there were no serious problems. However, Mercola writes:

Following each regimen of antibiotics, analgesics, or steroidal medications their condition grew progressively worse.

The doctors responded to each new symptom with yet another drug, until the children died.^[5]

Consider reading Chicken Pox: Why Do Children Die? It provides an excellent explanation of why allowing symptoms of disease to run their natural course is usually far more preferable to treating them with drugs.

So what’s the real number of children who died from chicken pox before modern medicine started stepping in to treat it? It appears that it was probably far lower than the official numbers provided by agencies like the CDC. The combination of chicken pox vaccinations with modern medicine needs to answer for an immense amount of harm.

Who Benefits?

Now, we’re finding that the chicken pox vaccine is causing a new epidemic of shingles. As ever, the standard response was to develop a new vaccine. And who developed it? Merck, of course! Merck is the sole manufacturer of chicken pox vaccine in the United States.

Now, Merck is profiteering from the shingles harm its chicken pox vaccination is causing! That vaccine is even being pushed in the UK, which doesn’t routinely vaccinate children against chicken pox.

That’s Big Pharma getting you coming and going. Worse, we now have governments moving to force everyone to be vaccinated.

Who benefits? Big Pharma, of course. But they aren’t the only ones. Doctors get paid to deliver these vaccinations, whether payment comes from government, insurance, or directly from people’s pockets. In the US, childhood vaccinations are rapidly becoming—if they aren’t already—the most profitable part of every pediatrician’s practice. Vaccines are, in fact, the primary reason for well-baby visits. Let’s not forget politicians, who receive massive Big Pharma and Big Medicine funding, and governmental agencies, whose employees now appear to live and die according to whether they support Big Pharma.

In terms of business, giving the chicken pox vaccine is an incredible money maker. First, Merck profits from the vaccine itself. Then they profit from all the sick children who suffer its adverse effects. And now they have a whole new market for their shingles vaccine, a market they created with the chicken pox vax.

This article is produced with particular thanks to Joseph Mercola, whose research on the topic provided the groundwork.