Photo by I woz ere.

Dr. Heather Zwickey has a Ph.D. in Immunology and Microbiology from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. She completed a post doctorate fellowship at Yale’s School of Medicine and currently serves as Director of Research at Helfgott Research Institute, Dean of Research at National College of Natural Medicine, and co-founder of a physician level vaccine educational service,  Vaccine Consult. We discussed vaccines, adjuvants (the additives in vaccines to induce an immune response) and the controversial Wakefield study.

WW: What is the most common question you hear from parents?

Is it healthy to give our newborns and infants so many shots? When parents look at the current CDC vaccination schedule, they notice that there are between four to eight shots at every single well-baby visit – at 2, 4, 6, 12, 18, and sometimes 24 months. That is 42 shots by the time they are three to four years old. Vaccine manufacturers are starting to reduce the number of shots by including more vaccines into a single shot. The multiple vaccine combinations are shown to induce an effective immune response, but the safety is still unstudied and unknown. The safety studies will not be complete until the vaccine is licensed and actually given to a large number of children. If these multiple vaccine combinations are found to be unsafe, they are then recalled. There is no way to test the safety ahead of time.

WW: Is there an alternative to the current CDC vaccination schedule?

Usually the alternative is breast feeding. If a parent is breastfeeding, they can often avoid many of the vaccines that are currently recommended.

WW: When a mother is breast feeding, which vaccines are still necessary?

This is where individualized medicine is needed. Every single patient has different risk factors that need to be considered when a parent is making an informed medical decision. If it were me, I would still vaccinate against polio because of the possible permanent neurological effects. A different vaccination that may or may not be needed is pertussis. Pertussis was much more deadly in the 1950s, but with the advent of antibiotics, it is much less deadly. Even with modern day anti-biotic treatment of pertussis, it is important for parents to ask themselves if they are okay with staying up late into the night with a child who could have whooping cough so bad that they are red to blue during six minute coughing fits and throwing up. Certainly there are pertussis outbreaks in certain communities. Whether pertussis is a vaccine required for a child, the decision must be, like all other vaccines, discussed with your physician. Ultimately parents must ask themselves, can they live with the permanent consequences of their decisions.

WW: Let’s talk about the Wakefield study.

In the 1980s, Andrew Wakefield did a large study on kids that have autism. He was looking for potential causes that were related to vaccination. On a side note, one of the public misconceptions is that there was mercury or thimerosol in the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine. There has never been mercury/thimerosol in the MMR vaccine. An observation was made that children developed autism around the time they received the MMR vaccine and so a responsible ingredient in the MMR vaccine was sought. Dr. Wakefield collected blood and stool samples from children to research any possible immunological response that could be attributed to the MMR vaccinations. Dr. Wakefield found antibodies to measles and may have found some live measles virus in some of autistic children in his study.

WW: The study (finding that vaccination causes autism) was dismissed by the Lancet Journal. Why?

There were a few problems with the study. The sample size was really small (at 12 autistic children). Also, Dr. Wakefield was paid by the parents of the kids to do the study. Although this was a blatant conflict of interest, this phenomenon is common in scientific research and even more so in medicine. Almost every new drug being studied is being paid for by a pharmaceutical company. It is rare to have purely independently funded scientific research. Regardless of Dr. Wakefield’s conflict of interest, he had a poorly designed cross-sectional study in a very specific group of autistic kids without a control group (who didn’t get the MMR vaccine). Another poor design aspect was that the evidence in blood and/or stool of an “adverse” reaction to the MMR vaccine is the same immune response you get in all children whether autistic or not.

WW: At the time of Dr. Wakefield’s study, was it known that there were measurable immune responses to vaccines in blood and/or stool?

Yes, they did know that an immune response could be measured through titers [a quantifiable concentration of immunoglobulins], but the medical community did not know, and they were surprised, that the immune response could be sustained at such an elevated level over one year after the MMR vaccination.

WW: What is the most common myth that “alternative” medicine practitioners hold and what does the actual science show?

Benedict Lust has this wonderful quote which he says, and I am paraphrasing here, “Who ever is so foolish as to put the putrid pus of another organism in their blood is crazy and they’re just going to get sick.” I think that there are a few things that stand out from teaching hundreds of alternative medicine students. First, it’s a downplaying of germ theory. Alternative medicine emphasizes the concept that disease is not from infectious agents, but that most disease is a result from an imbalance in your body’s overall health. I totally understand the belief that if you have a strong immune system, and are exposed to an infectious agent, you will not get sick. I would say that there are actually some very infectious diseases that if exposed to, no matter how strong or in balance you are, you will get sick and even have long term or permanent consequences.

The other misconception I see is that a homeopathic vaccination is going to give you a measurable titer or immune response to a microbe. I have not ever seen raw or even statistically analyzed results showing a homeopathically induced immune response. I am told that this data exists, but I have never seen this personally. When I do see these results, I will be cautiously excited, but I will also want to see if the results are scientifically reproducible. To me, an immunologist, the idea that you can give no antigen and get a response is not within my conception of probability. There are homeopathic studies out there that show symptom modulation suggesting an immune response is occurring, but quantifiable data has never been recorded.

WW: What is the most common myth that conventional medicine practitioners hold and what is does the actual science show?

Most medical doctors think that the current CDC vaccination schedule is used because it is somehow more healthy for the child. Actually, the whole schedule is set up based upon well-baby visits and convenience for the parents and doctors. The CDC vaccination schedule is not based upon optimal health of the child.

WW: What would be the ideal vaccination schedule?

Of course it should be based upon each individual child’s situation, but assuming that a parent is breast feeding and being health conscious, an optimal vaccination schedule would start between nine to twelve months. It definitely would not start at birth and be every two months. The argument made by most medical doctors is that the CDC schedule is from birth onwards because this is when these microbes are the most dangerous. If you are breast feeding and the child is in a low risk environment, most infectious microbes are not that dangerous.

WW: So how much breast milk is adequate to protect an infant from infections?

HZ: Research to answer that question is in process. They are looking at women who don’t produce milk and have to use supplementary milk from other mothers. A small study out of Sweden seems to show that any amount of breast milk is enough.

WW: When are adjuvants important?

Adjuvants are important in vaccines that are only protein and/or polysaccharide parts of bacteria or viruses. An example of this would be the Hib or DTaP vaccine. Adjuvants are not in “live” vaccines like the MMR, polio, or the influenza vaccine. One of the new adjuvants is a chemical called MF59 that is found in some makeup and beauty products. In Japan, MF59 it has been outlawed as it is a known carcinogen in laboratory tests. MF59 was used in some of the H1N1 flu vaccines and the hope was that it would be a good widespread test of MF59 safety. Since the vaccine came out after many people had already become infected with H1N1, MF59 never really got tested well in the general public.

GR: Often times bacterial vaccines are grown on a substrate that contains egg or other foods. Do you think there is a connection between adjuvants, manufacturing residuals and allergies?

HZ: There may be a connection between allergies and vaccinations not because of the adjuvants or manufacturing residuals, but because of the timing of the vaccinations. In an infant, a TH2 [allergy] response is much more likely than a TH1 response to a vaccination. The TH1 response is an immune response seen in a mature immune system. I also think that the timing of food introduction is very important in
determining food allergies.

Dr. Gibran Ramos completed his six year training and internship in Naturopathic and Chinese Medicine at National College of Natural Medicine. Dr. Ramos helps patients transform their lives and optimize their well-being at a private practice in Portland, Oregon.