The Unhealthiest State In America Has The Best Vaccination Rate
~hehe "nut~in" ta C here folks ...move along
In a Daily Beast opinion
piece on December 15, Paul Offit—one of the vaccine industry’s most
strident ambassadors—puzzles over a seeming contradiction. How, Offit
wonders, could the state of Mississippi, which has “the worst overall
health in the nation,” have used standout “efficiency” to achieve over 99.4% vaccine
coverage in kindergartners? Rather than seriously investigate this
apparent enigma, Offit presents his ready-made answer and reveals his
article’s true purpose. According to Paul Offit, Mississippi’s high
vaccination rates are due to the state’s 1979 decision to make the
government—rather than parents—the primary vaccine decision-maker for
children.
Reflecting on the Mississippi Supreme
Court’s 1979 elimination of that state’s religious exemption to
vaccination, Offit applauds the Court’s position, stating, “If a parent
harbors a religious belief that contradicts a basic tenant [sic] of
modern medicine…the state has a right to protect the child from the
irresponsible acts of the parent.” Offit—though a parent himself—tells
readers that the state-determined “duty” to vaccinate supersedes other
parental rights. In short, Offit appears to believe that coercion is the
name of the game, openly admitting that he disapproves of the 47 states that
still allow parents in the U.S. to take religious, moral or personal
beliefs into account when making vaccine decisions on behalf of their
children.
“The worst health in the nation”
According to the comprehensive state-by-state health rankings that Offit cites, Mississippi has remained squarely at the bottom of the nation’s overall health rankings for decades (Figure 1). The low ranking correlates, in part, with the state’s poverty statistics: one-third of Mississippi’s children live in poverty (the highest percentage of any state), and 87% of the state’s Medicaid enrollees are children. But from birth on, scattered health statistics suggest that Mississippi’s children and adolescents face other physical and mental health challenges as well. To cite some examples from the available data:- Mississippi’s infant mortality rate is more than twice as high (8.8 deaths per thousand live births) as New Hampshire’s (4.2 per 1000), which is the U.S. state with the highest health ranking. The percentage of low birthweight babies in Mississippi is also high—11.4% versus 6.9% in New Hampshire.
- Asthma-related emergency department visits and hospital discharges are higher for children ages 0-4 than for any other pediatric or adult age group.
- The obesity rate for Mississippi high school students (18.9%) is significantly higher than the national average (13.9%) and has been increasing steadily since 2001.
- A study that examined Medicaid recipients in Mississippi who received services related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 2007 found that 88% were age 21 or younger (1170/1330). Most young Medicaid recipients with ASD were on psychotropic medications (62% of 10-and-under children and 75% of youth in the 11-21 age group). On average, over the one-year study period, each young Medicaid recipient with ASD had twelve (< 10 years old) to sixteen (ages 11-21) psychotropic drug claims.
- Mississippi’s high school students are significantly more likely than the nation’s high schoolers to attempt suicide (12.7% versus 8.6%), and the percentage has doubled since 2001. The percentage of Mississippi students making a suicide plan has increased by 45% since 2011.
Figure 1. Mississippi’s overall health ranking, 1990–2016
Avoiding the obvious question
Despite juxtaposing two critical pieces
of health information about Mississippi’s children—high vaccine coverage
and poor health rankings—Offit does not ask the obvious
elephant-in-the-room question: Could one have something to do with the
other? Clearly, factors such as poverty and nutrition are one set of
influences on health status, but vaccines—potent
immune-system-stimulating medical interventions administered repeatedly,
both prenatally and from birth—must be considered as another influence.
Mississippi’s medical practitioners and Offit are shirking their
ethical responsibilities by denying vaccines’ ability to trigger adverse
health outcomes, including death.
Researchers who are less disingenuous than Offit have plausibly linked many of the above-listed health conditions (asthma, obesity, ASD and other neurodevelopmental disorders and infant mortality) to vaccines. ASD, in turn, has been associated with disrupted circadian rhythms, which appear to be linked to increased risk of suicide attempts in adolescents. Parents also
have reported suicide as an outcome of devastating HPV vaccine damage.
None of these associations should come as a surprise, given that
vaccines intentionally tamper with normal immune system functioning and
also contain unsafe aluminum adjuvants and/or other toxic ingredients such as thimerosal and formaldehyde.
Looking at infant mortality
Since the early 1990s, newborns have
received the first of three mandated hepatitis B (HepB) shots within 24
hours of birth. In 1999, the head of the Association of American
Physicians & Surgeons warned Congress
that HepB vaccine recipients were 100 times more likely to experience a
serious reaction from the HepB vaccine itself than from the disease.
In July 2017, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that
there was “preponderant evidence” supporting the claim that vaccines
“actually caused or substantially contributed” to SIDS.
A 2017 study of
reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) concurs
with this warning and suggests that young children bear a heavy burden
of HepB damage. Looking at over 20,000 adverse events reported to VAERS
over a ten-year period (2005–2015) following administration of
single-antigen HepB vaccine (or other HepB-containing vaccines), the
researchers found that half (51%) of all the adverse event reports were
for children under two years of age, and another 13% were for
2-to-18-year-olds. The serious adverse events reported in association
with single-antigen HepB vaccine included 45 deaths, with sudden infant
death syndrome (SIDS) being the “most commonly reported cause.” In July
2017, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that
there was “preponderant evidence” supporting the claim that vaccines
“actually caused or substantially contributed” to SIDS. A 2008 SIDS
autopsy study also
found that SIDS cases often manifest “signs of inflammation and
response to infection” that are “out of proportion to pre-existing
symptoms.” These authors added that SIDS infants typically are “not
totally ‘normal’ in the days prior to a SIDS death” and frequently
display symptoms such as “listlessness” and “droopiness”—the types of “mild problems” that public health experts list as possible reactions to vaccination.
Now consider Mississippi’s high infant mortality rate. Half of all infant deaths in
Mississippi occur on the very first day of life, and another 25% happen
within the first month. Mississippi’s most recent analysis of child
deaths reports
that there were 523 child deaths in the state in 2014. For almost three
in ten deaths (29% or 151/523), the State Department of Health
considered the cause of death to be “conditions originating in the
perinatal period,” with another 19% (102/523) in the “other and unknown”
category. Reviewers then examined 172 of the total cases (33%) in
greater detail, including 57 infant deaths. Almost three-fourths (70% or
40/57) of the infant deaths were due to “asphyxia,” and the cause of
death for another 12 infants (21%) “remained undetermined.” Research has
shown that U.S. medical examiners and coroners are inconsistent in the
cause of death that they apply to sudden unexpected infant deaths and
often classify them as “suffocation/asphyxia.” This lack of
consistency—and the masking of deaths that may be
vaccine-related—“impacts true understanding of infant mortality causes,
and inhibits our ability to accurately monitor and ultimately prevent
future deaths.”
Rather than
crediting parents who have the wisdom to ask valid questions about
vaccine safety, Offit and his ilk want Big Brother to take over.
Coercive tactics
Offit makes it clear that he wants other
states to follow Mississippi’s example and take away parental rights to
make vaccine decisions. For him, the fact that vaccination rates are
high across the U.S. and that relatively few parents exercise current
exemption options appears to be beside the point. A February 2017 Forbes propaganda
piece about West Virginia (one of the two other states to have deprived
its citizens of religious exemptions) reveals the same pro-coercion
mindset. The Forbes writer (who has since had multiple articles retracted due to serious questions about conflicts of interest) admits that West Virginia parents “vaccinate their children primarily because they have no other choice”
[emphasis added] and that vaccination rates “would dip dangerously if
nonmedical exemptions were allowed.” Rather than crediting parents who
have the wisdom to ask valid questions about vaccine safety, Offit and
his ilk want Big Brother to take over.
A recent commentary in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health provides
a different perspective. Calling attention to the “neurotoxic content”
of many vaccines and “disturbing evidence” that vaccines may not be as
safe as implied, the author, Keith Schofield, calls on government to
recognize the potential for toxins in the environment and in vaccines to
have damaging synergistic effects and create a neurotoxic “overload” in
both humans and fetuses. Rather than going after Constitutional and
parental rights, Offit would do well to heed Schofield’s call for the
U.S. medical profession to “reassess its current general vaccination
program” and admit that the nation’s “excessive” vaccine schedule “has
to be considered dangerous [and] irresponsible.”
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