Leave it to Barbara Mullarkey to make the quintessential inquiry, calling into question the safety of the novel H1N1 vaccine designated for mass administration. [Swine flu shot answers needed, News, Sept. 30, 2009] Our federal and state health officials fall seriously short of providing the public with honest and substantive information, critical to granting one’s truly informed consent. The citizens of Oak Park and Illinois should be grateful to have Mullarkey as their advocate, and they should demand more from their public health administrators than just the canned rhetoric designed to promote an action aligned with agendas, rather than with public safety in mind.
With no independent, scientific, published, peer-reviewed clinical data on any of the novel H1N1 vaccines, manufacturers will rely on the data from their seasonal flu vaccines for safety and effectiveness. Anyone considering vaccination with the seasonal flu vaccine or the newly developed swine flu vaccine should be aware of the limitations listed by the manufacturers on their product information literature. No influenza vaccine has been tested for its potential to be carcinogenic (cancer-causing) or mutagenic (mutating from its original form). No influenza vaccine has been tested on fertility impairment, reproductive capacity, fetal harm when injected into pregnant women or excretion in human milk. So why are pregnant women a targeted risk group and being told the vaccine is safe? There is no safety data on administering seasonal influenza vaccines with the new H1N1 influenza vaccine or with any other childhood vaccine. This begs the question: How has safety been determined if no studies have been conducted to evaluate it? And what standard of safety do you accept?
History is destined to repeat itself and often times with grave misfortunes. Now we know what adverse reactions are likely to follow influenza vaccination because the manufacturer tells us so. They include Guillain-Barré syndrome, thrombocytopenia, anaphylactic shock, neuralgia, neuropathy and vasculitis, just to name a few. A vaccination risk to stack up against an infection that the World Health Organization claims is extremely difficult if not impossible to confirm. A risk that many doctors and health care administrators are refusing to take.
I hope you get your answers, Ms. Mullarkey. All this hype about swine flu and the vaccine to allegedly prevent it sounds more like someone’s fairy tale in which some little piggy goes to market and other little piggies get fat on roast beef!
Maureen Drummond
Co-founder and co-director, New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice
Thank you for printing Barbara Mullarky’s factual and informative piece about the swine flu vaccine. This is exactly the sort of reporting that we the people want, need and deserve more of on a regular basis from our news sources.
Nancy Trock
Oak Park
