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Who Knew What?

Thinking about how to start a campaign, I decided that the first requirement was intelligent publicity, supported by some official reports on the arguments in question. In l973, however, it was very difficult to get any publicity started about vaccination as the media followed the official view that any criticism of vaccinations or vaccination policy would be highly irresponsible. Vaccination was, the Department of Health said, one of the greatest success stories in the history of medicine in modern times. The benefits greatly exceeded the disadvantages, the Department added, listing the benefits as freedom from disease for all who were vaccinated and the resultant significant savings in medical costs which infectious diseases caused. The disadvantages were never mentioned.

Looking for medical arguments which would support any campaign, I found a Public Health Laboratory Service report in the British Medical Journal of 3 February 1973, which reported that the whooping cough vaccine in use for five or six years before 1968 was not very effective, following which the potency of the vaccine was increased.

Reading further, I found copy of a presentation by the late Professor George Dick to an International Symposium on Combined Vaccines in 1967, which referred to his report on reactions to the pertussis (whooping cough) element of the triple vaccine (combining diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough), in which he said that, based on reports from two cities in the UK, up to 80 cases of brain damage could occur each year from its use. Showing a great deal of concern for children in vaccination programmes, he was worried about the suggestion that the strength of the vaccine should be doubled and he argued that, if this was done, then children should not be offered the vaccine until they were six months old, instead of three months according to the policy at the time.

Going back even further, I found the British Medical Journal report of July 5 1958, in which Dr JM Berg of the Fountain Hospital, London, not only discussed what he called the seventh case of brain damage from whooping cough vaccination in Great Britain, but also referred to an analysis of many similar cases reported in other countries.

For instance, there was a report by Byers and Moll in 1948 citing 15 infants from 5 to 18 months old, none of whom had suffered previous convulsions, all of whom suffered reactions after vaccination, within 20 minutes or 72 hours. Two infants died from pneumonia, five suffered hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of the body), two became decebrate (damage to the brain), five suffered mental retardation and only one recovered.

I also discovered many other reports published between 1949 and 1965, some of which had been sent directly to the Ministry of Health; many are listed in a reference section at the end of this book. These reports were published in the medical press but received no national publicity which could have alerted parents to possible danger. Neither, it appears, did the reports cause concern to the Department of Health officials whose strong promotion of whooping cough vaccination in the UK began around 1957. A total of 187 cases of severe reaction to whooping cough vaccination was eventually built up.

I also found reports about damage following the use of Salk polio vaccine in America and following measles vaccine when it was first introduced in the UK in 1968.

I had never heard of any of these reports and, having started out more or less tentatively suggesting that I was sure vaccination had injured my daughter, I found them amazing and upsetting. They strengthened my resolve to raise the whole issue of vaccine damage publicly in the interests of those who had suffered.

I had mentioned all of this to Dr Harris, Helen’s doctor at the time and although, like many other doctors in the early 1970s, he knew little about vaccine damage, he was helpful and encouraging, but had little more to offer.

Then, one morning, I was out and about in my local area when I ran into Dr Harris again. He seemed glad to have the opportunity to stop and chat, and it became clear that he wanted to give me an article of some sort. Glancing at it, I realised that it related to Helen’s condition, and that it would confirm that I was not alone. Indeed, it also confirmed that the authorities elsewhere in Europe had already started to take action on vaccination-related conditions, and that perhaps there was now some official acknowledgement that governmental bodies had to take some responsibility for the outcome of their immunisation programmes.

When I got a chance to read the article in detail, I was astonished. What I had in my hands was a report of an International Symposium on Vaccination against Communicable Diseases held in Monaco that year, 1973, in which not only was vaccine damage discusssed in detail, but one section was devoted to a discussion by a German health official on ‘compensation for injuries possibly related to immunisation’. The German Government, I discovered, had introduced a compensation scheme for injuries relating to immunisation as far back as 1962, which was later amended when more experience of the kinds of injuries and the circumstances in which they had occurred was available. Under the German scheme, medical and other costs were covered by regular payments and there was also a pension scheme to cover any disability where earning capacity was impaired.

I was utterly amazed – I had spent ten years worrying about Helen’s condition and wondering about the cause of it, but had never seen or heard of any of the publicity which would have made these details public knowledge. I had never met anyone who knew about vaccine damage and couldn’t understand how I could have missed any reference to what appeared to be a closely guarded secret.

If anything was needed to convince me that I had a right to say publicly that children in this country had been vaccine damaged and that the Government had a responsibility to make special provision for them, this article was it. I was now convinced that I had valid grounds for starting a campaign for compensation for my daughter and for anyone else injured in the same way. I was well aware that I would be criticised by sections of the medical profession and that the media might be reluctant to get involved. Vaccination had always been the ‘sacred cow’ of medicine, and any questions raised about any aspect of it were not welcomed. Despite my reservations, though, and the inevitable criticism that would come my way, I felt I owed it to my daughter and all those current and future victims to let others know what I knew, and so bring the Government to account and offer others the freedom to make informed choices about their children’s lives.