Herd Immunity

The idea of “herd immunity” is the justification often given for vaccine laws, and is also used in hate language directed at those who choose not to vaccinate.

People believe that if a certain percentage (currently 95%) of children are fully vaccinated, diseases will not spread in the community, and this protects infants too young to be vaccinated, people who have not responded to their vaccines, people who cannot be vaccinated and people who have compromised immune systems.

This thinking has no validity, either in science or simple logic. Please find below articles and videos which debunk the theory of herd immunity and its use as a justification for vaccine mandates.

The Misunderstood Theory of Herd Immunity
By Marco Cáceres
“Given that at least half the population has effectively been without vaccine protection for many years, we should have experienced a massive resurgence in childhood infectious diseases. But this has not happened. In other words, we haven’t had herd immunity in the U.S., and yet the world hasn’t come tumbling down.”

The Deadly Impossibility Of Herd Immunity Through Vaccination, by Dr. Russell Blaylock
“In the original description of herd immunity, the protection to the population at large occurred only if people contracted the infections naturally. The reason for this is that naturally-acquired immunity lasts for a lifetime. The vaccine proponents quickly latched onto this concept and applied it to vaccine-induced immunity. But, there was one major problem – vaccine-induced immunity lasted for only a relatively short period, from 2 to 10 years at most, and then this applies only to humoral immunity. This is why they began, silently, to suggest boosters for most vaccines, even the common childhood infections such as chickenpox, measles, mumps, and rubella.”

Herd Immunity: Can Mass Vaccination Achieve It?
By Tetyana Obukhanych, Ph.D.
“The herd immunity theory is based on a faulty assumption that vaccination elicits in an individual a state equivalent to bona fide immunity (life-long resistance to viral re-infection). As with any garbage in – garbage out type of theory, the expectations of the herd immunity theory are bound to fail in the real world.”
and
“Mass vaccination eventually ceases endemic disease outbreaks by removing viral circulation in the community, instead of inducing permanent immunity in the vaccinated. However, viral diseases, although reduced in incidence in many countries, are not fully eradicated from all parts of the world. A region-specific elimination of viral exposure at the time when the virus is present globally is hardly good news. Prolonged mass childhood vaccination is a measure of disease control that with time makes our entire adult population (but more importantly infants) more and more defenseless against the incompletely eradicated virus, which can be easily re-imported.”

Immunologist Tetyana Obukhanych: Unvaccinated Children Pose “No Extra Danger to the Public”
In this letter to legislators Tetyana Obukhanych explains how having a high vaccination rate does not prevent the spread of infection, looking particularly at polio, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, Hib disease, hepatitis B and measles. Do scroll down to the Appendix and comments.

Let’s talk about herd immunity
By Levi Quackenboss
“Adding up all infants under 18 months, 5 year olds, and 12 year olds, every year pediatricians are vaccinating only 5% of the entire US population with a whooping cough vaccine that becomes nearly useless after just one year. Then, we hold these children accountable for the pertussis “herd immunity” of all 323 million Americans, while blaming “anti-vaxxers” for the occasional pertussis outbreaks that occur.”
and
“In a 2008 study published in the prestigious Journal of Infectious Diseases, researchers discovered that measles vaccine antibodies were shown to decrease a whopping 50% in the first 8 years after the second dose of MMR, and yet another 23% 7 years after that.”
and
“Based on the peer-reviewed published efficacy of the Tdap and MMR, at any given point in time only 5% of Americans have some sort of waning vaccine-induced immunity to pertussis, and 12% have full to half-immunity to measles. But let’s blame moms who have taken years to educate themselves on vaccine safety for this failure.”

Natural vs. Artificial Herd Immunity: What Have Failed Vaccination Programs Taught Us?
By James Lyons-Weiler, PhD – Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK)
James discusses mainly pertussis (whooping cough), mumps and vaccine safety in this article.
“The vaccination paradigm holds that a specific percentage of vaccinated in a population will bring about herd immunity fails at 95 percent in part because people who are vaccinated lose their immunity. With acellular pertussis, the immunity is lost fairly quickly; one study in 2005 found that adolescents who were schedule-compliant for pertussis vaccination only had 73% effectiveness within one year of the final booster, and that the effectiveness rate dropped to 34% within two to four years. Compared to natural immunity, which lasts four to 20 years, the pertussis immunization program cannot be expected to contribute to herd immunity as well as vaccine proponents would have us believe.”

Junk Science Week: Vaccinating the ‘herd’
By Lawrence Soloman
“The dangers extend to infants who, as USA Today points out, are too young to be vaccinated. These entirely helpless members of “the herd” depend on antibodies inherited from their mothers. Yet previously vaccinated mothers have few antibodies to pass on, depriving their babies of protection. The only tried-and-true way for mothers to safeguard their infants — those most at risk of death from measles — remains nature’s way: by ensuring that the mother had previously contracted natural measles.”

Vaccination destroys herd immunity
In this article, Greg Beattie, a past president of the AVN, reports on a study published in 2017. From the article:
“According to the findings, the unvaccinated cohort were brimming with immunity. They had three times the level of antibodies as the single dose group, and eight times that of the double dose group!”

Top Australian Immunisation Official Admits Problems With Vaccines And Vaccine Laws
Listen to podcast interview of Professor Peter McIntyre, Director of the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in Australia.
He says, of today’s mothers (regarding measles):
“By the time they’ve reached their twenties or thirties, their antibody levels that are transmitted to the baby may be quite low compared to what used to happen when mothers had measles acquired from natural infection.”
He also says:
“Pertussis will continue to circulate even though we’ve got high immunisation rates”

Evolution of the immune system in humans from infancy to old age
Surely the goal of achieving vaccine-induced “herd immunity” is to protect young infants, but this article by scientists at University of Oxford UK says the following:
“It is remarkable that a mother can transfer sufficient antibody to protect her infant when she was infected 20–30 years previously. The transmission of protective antibody protection from a mother to her child is hugely important, especially in environments where 15% or more infants and children die of infection. Paradoxically, a mother who avoided a dangerous childhood infection, through herd immunity, may actually put her child at risk by being unable to transfer specific protective antibodies.”

Herd Immunity: Flawed Science and Mass Vaccination Failures
By Suzanne Humphries MD. In this very comprehensive article Dr Humphries discusses herd immunity with regard to chicken pox, shingles, the pneumococcal vaccine, pertussis and measles, and has an in-depth look at smallpox and its claimed eradication by vaccination.
“But the vaccination plan leaves the elderly (due to vaccine-induced immunity being short-lived and antigens taken out of circulation) and the very young (due to lack of transferrable maternal immunity) more vulnerable to several diseases that were not a threat to them before vaccination. In the case of chicken pox, vaccination renders the elderly more apt to shingles infections, because the herd has now lost the continued and benign re-exposures to children with chicken pox.”

Measles jab reduces inherited immunity
Article on BBC News
Mass vaccination is meant to protect vulnerable infants too young to be vaccinated, but it is having the opposite effect.
“Children whose mothers were vaccinated against measles may be far more naturally susceptible to the disease, researchers have claimed. The study, published in the US journal Pediatrics, says that women who have been inoculated while young have far less immunity to the disease to pass on to their own offspring. If correct, this would mean that past decades of rising immunisation rates in the UK could have left unvaccinated modern babies increasingly vulnerable to the disease, which, in very rare cases, can kill.”

Dr Tetyana Obukhanych, Ph.D. – Natural Immunity and Vaccination (Video)

 

Pertussis (whooping cough)

Science has established the pertussis vaccine suppresses pertussis symptoms but does not stop pertussis infection or the spread of pertussis. This means people can be infected without knowing it, so fail to stay away from other people when they should – this is particularly worrying if they have the vaccine then visit new babies, which they often do. See the following studies:

Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model
“In this study, we show nonhuman primates vaccinated with aP were protected from severe symptoms but not infection and readily transmitted Bordetella pertussis to contacts.”
and
“These data provide a plausible explanation for pertussis resurgence and suggest that attaining herd immunity will require the development of improved vaccination strategies that prevent B. pertussis colonization and transmission.”

Asymptomatic transmission and the resurgence of Bordetella pertussis
“In light of current evidence and our results, we cannot dismiss the potential far-reaching epidemiological consequences of asymptomatic transmission of B. pertussis and an ineffective B. pertussis vaccine.”

Finding the ‘who’ in whooping cough: vaccinated siblings are important pertussis sources in infants 6 months of age and under
This study published by Western Australian scientists found that infants with pertussis most often caught it from their vaccinated older brothers and sisters. Thus the pertussis vaccine does not give protection to vulnerable unvaccinated individuals.
“At its peak, siblings were the most important sources of pertussis in infants 6 months and younger, particularly fully vaccinated children aged 2 and 3 years. Waning immunity before the booster at 4 years may leave this age group susceptible to infection. Even if cocooning programs could achieve full vaccination coverage of parents and ensure all siblings were fully vaccinated according to national schedules, waning immunity in siblings could provide a means for ongoing transmission to infants.”

Qld Health doctor and SAVN leader Stephen Lambert’s confession about Whooping Cough vaccine too little too late
Read on our blog about how Australian officials have known for many years the pertussis vaccine does not stop pertussis from spreading.
“As will be shown below, Lambert has now admitted to problems with the effectiveness of the Whooping Cough vaccine, a fact about which he would have been well aware for a very long time; at least as far back as 2010. ”

Dr Ann Koehler – Whooping Cough Cocooning Strategy Scam
In her role as Director of the Communicable Disease Control Branch in South Australia, Associate Professor Ann Koehler gave a talk in 2014 about the pertussis vaccine. While discussing the uptick in pertussis cases in 2009 and 2010 in South Australia, she says:

We were under a huge amount of pressure to introduce a cocooning program and we resisted that because our data didn’t suggest that it was going to work.

clearly pertussis vaccination doesn’t prevent infection

So we know pertussis vaccination doesn’t prevent infections so we could not see how it could be all that good for a cocooning program that was meant to prevent infection all around a baby.

It all begs the questions: where was the pressure coming from, why is cocooning being pushed by politicians today and why are families being penalised and demonised for not using a vaccine that doesn’t work?

 

Shedding

It is an undeniable fact that live virus vaccines spread viral diseases through vaccinated individuals shedding viruses, so if the goal of having herd immunity is to stop the spread of disease, especially to protect infants and the immunocompromised, these vaccines aren’t doing it. The live virus vaccines on the Australian schedule are measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and rotavirus.

Public Health Officials Know: Recently Vaccinated Individuals Spread Disease
“Physicians and public health officials know that recently vaccinated individuals can spread disease and that contact with the immunocompromised can be especially dangerous. For example, the Johns Hopkins Patient Guide warns the immunocompromised to “Avoid contact with children who are recently vaccinated,” and to “Tell friends and family who are sick, or have recently had a live vaccine (such as chicken pox, measles, rubella, intranasal influenza, polio or smallpox) not to visit.” [The hospital’s page saying this has now disappeared, but there is a copy of it on this page]

Shedding
This page lists over 100 science studies on vaccinated people developing infection from a vaccine and spreading it (i.e. “shedding” virus particles)

Vaccine Shedding
“It has long been known that vaccines can cause the diseases they were meant to immunise against. ”

The simple logic

Here is the simple logic, in case you were wondering:

Children under 15 make up 17% of our population here in Australia. The majority of adults have had their childhood vaccines and any boosters wear off, and because there has been a sharp increase in the number of childhood vaccines, anyone over 30 has had far from the full complement of vaccines anyway. Also, the older group who have life-long natural immunity to diseases like measles are dying off. This all leaves the majority of adults without immunity to the vaccine-targeted diseases.

So it’s ludicrous to think increasing the vaccination rate of 17% of the population from 93 to 95% or even 100% would make any difference to the population as a whole. Our politicians and health authorities forgot about the adults. Oops.