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Institute of Medicine Releases Immunization Safety Review on Multiple Immunizations and Immune Dysfunction

February 20, 2002

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Point/Counterpoint

by Gregory Ellis, PhD, CNS

The National Academy of Sciences’ Panel on vaccine safety concluded their recent investigation into the epidemiology of multiple vaccines and immune system dysfunction. Their final statement was that the evidence "was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship." This conclusion is consistent with the Committee's tentative rejection of a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has long advocated increased basic research into the biological mechanisms for immunity and vaccine adverse effects. It has emphasized a study of methods to identify genetic and other biomarkers that may play a role in increasing susceptibility to vaccine-related issues. The IOM Committee acknowledged the absence of research in this area.

Do We Have the Correct Scientific Models in Place to Effectively Evaluate Vaccines’ Effects on Health?

We must first consider, however, an issue that is rarely discussed, if ever. That issue is whether the current research models used by institutions such as the IOM possess the necessary rigor to find any association, if it exists, between the modern diseases that vaccines are accused of causing. My contention is that today’s research models are unable to uncover if vaccines cause disease.

The current research models are based on a 300-year-old model first proposed by Rene Descartes. He asserted that the structures and operations of the human body were reducible to mechanical models. In his view, the soul was out of the range of human investigation. Descartes’ “reductionism” model is still used by medical science today. It tries to reduce complex problems to the smallest possible unit of study. From this, the study of life becomes, instead, the study of molecules. Further, modern epidemiological statistical techniques rely on a method called relative risk analysis. This method sheds no light on the rates of disease in a population. It is used inappropriately in analyzing data for which it was not designed.

The reductionist method does not allow a study of the most important attribute of humans: their responses to living. Further, modern medicine has completely ignored the on-going scientific study of a human’s “healing power (force) of nature.” This is the Vis Medicatrix Naturae of the early Roman medical thinkers. On-going studies of this power are bringing to light many important insights. They demonstrate the fact that living organisms survive by maintaining an immensely complex reactive defense system. This system has evolved to fight threats arising from within or outside the body.

Most medical scientists shy away from issues related to the study of man’s nature. Therefore, they never see his reactions to disturbing and noxious stimuli. The complex array of organism defense mechanisms and the role they play in the disease process make it impossible to use the kind of generalizations and one-size-fits-all treatment programs of modern medicine.

The Doctrine of Specific Etiology and the Germ Theory of Disease

Medical philosophy believes that disease is a thing in itself. It says disease is unrelated to any aspects of the patient. Patients have also embraced this teaching. As a result, they externalize their diseases and blame them on something they “ate” or “caught.” The Doctrine of Specific Etiology and its child, the Germ Theory of Disease, were rapidly accepted by modern medicine in the late 19^th century. The wholesale acceptance of these two theories led to the development of a therapeutic model that still reigns supreme more than 130 years later. Along with the acceptance of these two theories, cause-effect relationships came to be taken as a matter of course in biological thinking. This notion, of outside causes of disease, displaced the notion about man as reactive and vital, defending himself against environmental assaults.

The Germ Theory of Disease is acceptable intuitively and easy to grasp. In reality, this belief about the relationship between microbe and man has been so oversimplified that it does not fit the facts of disease. It has grown into a cult-like theory. It feeds on a few miracles. Supporters neglect to comment on the inconsistencies observed during the last century since its inception. The evidence supporting this theory has been imprecise. Historians present a biased account of this hotly debated topic. Arguments raged about the Germ Theory’s validity before its wholesale acceptance in the 1870’s. Many clinical observations didn’t support the idea that microbes were the cause of disease. Observations indicated that the so-called virulent microbes infested healthy men who didn’t get sick. Those who fell ill were already incapacitated by disturbances to their ecology. These early “ecological” theorists believed that bacteria were only the secondary cause of disease. The bacteria were, in reality, opportunistic invaders of a weakened and compromised host defense system. Without consciousness, microbes look for a meal and go after the weakest of the weak. Remember, if you don’t already know it, the first rule of living is: Eat or be eaten.

The Doctrine of Specific Etiology was the most powerful single force in the development of medicine during the past century. But it fails to provide an explanation for most diseases that arise in humans. Most health problems and diseases arise: 1) because of the simultaneous action of multiple agents and 2) from man’s responses. In this more common occurrence, cause and specificity are rarely apparent. As such, they are very difficult, if not impossible, to uncover.

In this overarching model, the features of a disease are determined by the response of the whole, complex, integrated organism. They don’t arise because of the specific characteristics of the supposed “causative” agent. An understanding of disease becomes more complicated when we realize that different agents lead to similar reactions. These arise because of the turning-on of the body’s non-specific defense system first described by Dr. Hans Selye in 1936. The body’s range of defensive, self-protective, and self-healing responses are limited. Therefore, its actions against a wide range of disturbing forces are similar.

The Body as a Vital, Self-Maintaining Organism Struggling to Survive

Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome, and its continuous refinement by modern-day science, minimizes the importance of the Doctrine of Specific Etiology. The Doctrine, reduced in importance in modern times, still serves, however, as the philosophical framework for modern medicine’s actions. The body’s response to noxious stimuli is a complex interplay between its hormonal, behavioral, biochemical, and physiological systems. These represent the organism’s efforts to survive. The specific characteristics of the noxious agents, themselves, rarely determine the pathological processes in the organism.

Today, it’s clear that the Doctrine of Specific Etiology is operative only in a limited number of human diseases. Because of this our thinking must expand. Broader ideas must include: 1) the operation of the external agents and 2) the factors that determine the responses of the organism. This broader overview recognizes not only the specific action of noxious agents but the organism’s responses to them.

In this new understanding, attempts to attribute cause to any agent must consider: 1) the impact of the single agent, 2) the impacts of all other agents one is exposed to, 3) a thorough analysis of the total environment and, 4) the responses generated by the organism to protect itself. These multi-factorial systems are painfully complicated. The current scientific research model is woefully inadequate to draw any conclusions because it lacks an understanding of how the complex, integrated, whole organism responds to challenges. If medicine continues to use this existing model, it cannot draw any meaningful conclusions.

We Need New Research Models to Make Sense of Vastly Different Environmental Conditions in Modern Times

Modern medicine does not study living organisms. The result is that it will fail to uncover many of the complex questions confronting us by the “new” diseases of the last 50 years. Living as a “process” has not been studied by science. A study of “living man” is not in line with the limited and outmoded reductionist method still in force today. Medical investigators ignore many phenomena that are understood empirically (based on observations). The reason: they don’t comply with the rules of reductionism and aren’t, therefore, fashionable.

Parts of medical science must move in new directions if it, and we, are to survive. Failing that, it should be supplanted by a more wholistic approach to health and disease. We need new models to answer questions now unresolved by our limited current methods of investigation. Medical “science” is unaware that the models they apply to resolve conditions such as autism are unworkable. The try to force round pegs into square holes. The new direction must focus on ways in which individual persons adapt and respond to their environment. Most effects created by environmental insults, including vaccines, are impossible to detect. Why? It’s because the effects are indirect and delayed. Often they don’t reach a critical threshold. They do not lead to some measurable outcome variable as required by the model such as death, cancer, or diagnosable pathology. Most agents of disease act subtly and do damage at levels below those detectable by the diagnostic tools now available.

Time is an essential part of this system. A substance can strongly damage a few within several days, weeks, or months. For others, it can lead to crippling secondary effects many months or years down the road. The damage created can occur over a wide spectrum. This, of course, leads to wide variations in the types of reactions and damage. It is well known that every drug of “proven” worth also has the potential to become the cause of disease even when used wisely.

Toxic Drug Effects Are Most Often Indirect, Non-Specific, and Delayed

The nature of toxins is that some of the toxic effects of drugs are specific and immediate. In most cases, however, the toxic effects are extremely indirect and delayed. A result of this subtle action is a disturbance to the organism’s ecological stability. The toxin’s mechanism of action is not a chemical or physiological reaction involving direct cause-effect relationships resulting from its specific action. The problems it causes arise, instead, from the complex interrelated responses generated by the whole, integrated organism. This type of toxic damage can only be understood through an approach that bases itself on an understanding of the integrated responses of the organism. Again, the organism is reactive, vital, and self-healing. It attempts to adapt and remain in ecological balance with its environment.

Many different substances are known to modify behavior. Many of these behavioral changes have been identified in the study of stress biology. These factors and understandings are wholly ignored by modern medicine. I’ve rarely encountered any physician who is even aware of this branch of study.

It’s through the above account that we can begin to understand how modern medicine won’t unravel the contributions of vaccines to the causes of autism. Its existing tools of investigation cannot stand up to that goal. Since they have complete confidence in their limited, fragmented, and philosophically empty research model, they will not move forward. Medicine has also chosen to ignore the Laws of Nature. Like a bull in a china shop, it arrogantly tramples on Mother Nature’s basic principles. Hippocrates’ doctrines were based on the idea that diseases are determined by the total environment and by man’s responses to challenges from that environment. But, although modern medicine invokes Hippocrates’ Dictum “First do no harm,” it ignores his larger teachings, much to our detriment.

Herbert Spencer, more than 100 years ago, said, “ Will anyone dare to say that it (vaccination) produces no further effect than that of shielding the patient from another disease? You cannot change the constitution in relation to one invading agent and have it unchanged in regard to other invading agents.” And, “We have no means of measuring alterations in resisting power.”

“When once you interfere with the order of nature,” he says, “there is no telling where the results will end.”

Vaccines, and Other Multiple Agents Are Implicated in the Cause of Autism

Autism is upon us because it’s the outcome of the 50-year experiment of dousing every living being with an overload of toxic substances, including vaccines. The distinctive behaviors of autism are the responses of the organism to the overwhelming challenge presented to it by a hostile environment. Parents have taken the ecological approach and observed (a valid scientific method) that vaccines damaged their child. They witnessed that his behavior and health deteriorated after the onslaught of vaccines, antibiotics, and other drugs and surgical treatments.

The revered nutritional epidemiology departments in our universities pump out an endless array of peer-reviewed scientific articles that have concluded that dietary fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. These studies arise largely from observations by lay people about their dietary habits. There’s never any question as to the validity of these observations. Why is it then that the observations of more than 90% of parents, who observed and believe that damage resulted from the mandatory vaccine program, are ignored, ridiculed, and discounted?

Why must the mandatory vaccine program be defended so vigorously? This “vision of the anointed” is based on the highly suspect Germ Theory of Disease. As such, unthinking, close-minded “scientists” cannot alter their reductionist scientific method. The outrageous profits garnered by the pharmaceutical companies in vaccine sales are another major obstacle preventing changes.

Studying the whole living organism reacting to challenges arising in the environment is the only viable method for determining the effects of vaccines on children. It is my view that this experiment is already complete. Who were the “scientists” in this experiment? They were the parents who carefully and meticulously observed the living organism reacting to his environment. They saw the complex, integrated response of the organism in its efforts to cope with the toxic exposure of vaccines. The horrible denial of parental observational skills represents a further black mark against our revered institutions and their members. There’s a growing crisis of public confidence against modern medicine, as there should be.

James Buchanan won the 1986 Nobel Prize for his work on Public Choice Theory. The basis of this theory is that all individuals and all institutions act in their own best interests, as they see it. They are concerned first with their own survival. This, of course, is consistent with the models I have presented above. Buchanan writes, “Politicians, bureaucrats, voters, and special-interest groups are all modeled as self-interested actors and their behavior will only be in the “public interest” as a matter of coincidence.” Is the IOM maintaining its own survival and that of its brother institutions or is it providing a public health benefit? Buchanan’s model provides the clear answer.

We Need Advanced and Sophisticated Approaches for Determining the Capacity of Humans to Resist the Effects of Toxic Insults

Another major failing of modern medicine is its failure to develop methods for the detection of organism weakness. These weaknesses make one individual more likely than another to experience damage from toxic exposure. Now, he experiences harm instead of benefit. This is fully operative in the autistic child. He is one, in my view, already born with a depleted bank account of healing capital. I propose other methods of determining if the individual is at risk for vaccine damage. For example, it has been my observation that many autistic children do not sunburn or suntan. This limitation is an easily observable failure in their defense system. I learned this because as I began a program of health building in these children their defense systems began to function again. A study of sun burning or sun tanning as an indication of a functioning defense system may be an effective early test. We can use this analysis to detect the quantity of healing and resistive capacity possessed by an individual. We don’t know at this time if this function was lost with the progression toward autism or if it was present at birth. But these are the types of studies we should be conducting.

Another epidemiological method would be the collection of data on the rates of ear and throat infections over time. In modern medicine’s viewpoint, this is a measure of immune system competence. In ecological doctrine, this represents a healing crisis, an attempt to eliminate toxins, a positive response generated by the organism’s healing efforts. In this model, it is not related to infection. We need to be careful with interpretations. The inability to “catch a cold” in medical philosophy, or to mount a healing response in ecological doctrine, could indicate, not a positive reaction but a negative one. This viewpoint suggests that the organism is too weak, too tired to mount a reaction to fight for its health. The lack of reactive capacity is imbued in my expression, “too sick to get sick.” It is this child, then, who may be most vulnerable to damage from the vaccines. I’ve often heard many parents state that their child never got sick.

Recent Understandings of the Nature of Quantum Physics and Man’s Relationship in This New World Dictate the Need for Refined Research Models

There are other unsettling problems with the current models. Each day we learn more about other aspects of human life that may account for many previously unexplained phenomena. Dr. William Tiller of Stanford University has demonstrated that there’s much more to learn about man in his universe. A century ago, science was self-congratulatory because of its strides in understanding the physical universe. From these, medicine applied the laws of physics to man as “machine,” in its attempt to understand health and disease. In this past century, however, things busted wide open with the discovery of quantum physics and the theory of relativity. These new findings make it clear that we must take a much broader view of the universe and man’s relationship to it. Therefore, the previous centuries’ sole reliance on Newtonian physics is over. A new era is upon us. It cannot possibly be understood with models developed during medicine’s last several centuries.

Several years ago I read a book entitled The End of Science. The author, John Horgan, presented a thesis that human beings had already discovered all of the important stuff -- airplanes, nuclear energy, DNA, and computers. He stated that future learning would, essentially, be on the margins. He believed that we simply could go no deeper.

At the time, I laughed at his statements because for many years, I had been studying the ideas I’ve presented above. In early 2000, an editorial appeared in the Op Ed page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The editorial staff had also read John Horgan’s book and offered its viewpoint on his analysis:

“Boy, was he wrong. For centuries, much of our learning has been about understanding the world of matter that we can see, touch, and feel. Only makes sense, right? But now physicists and astronomers have largely concluded that as much as 90 percent of the universe may be made up of “dark matter,” and that the supposedly empty reaches of space are full of “dark energy.” The scientific evidence now suggests that there’s far more to the universe than we’ve believed. In fact, the human study of the physical world has so far involved only about 10% of the universe’s mass. This news received its largest airing at the “Dark Matter 2000” conference in California.”

Our human “body” is part of this cosmic soup. Since it’s a part of this complex energetic universe, it’s also composed of similar elements. These include specific physical substances and a large mass of “energetic” substances. We are unable to define these with our normal senses. The process of unraveling these new domains and man’s Multi-Dimensional anatomy is picking up speed.

In my model of health and disease, subtle energy and energy fields are a real part of man’s complex anatomy. Disturbances occur at all levels of man’s Multi-Dimensional anatomy. The art of homeopathy has always embraced this notion. But, modern medicine and its advocates have always opposed the “Vitalistic” view. They have staunchly opposed every aspect of homeopathic doctrine. Although the Vitalistic view is now well studied and accepted by modern science, modern medicine ignores it entirely (note my distinction between science and medicine, they are not the same thing). Ignoring these precepts puts into serious doubt whether an institution such as the IOM can unravel complex issues such as autism and vaccines’ relationship to it.

The Vitalist argument is that the Germ Theory of Disease is mistaken. The Vitalist argues that germs are not the cause of illness and take hold in an organism only upon the collapse of its host defense systems. In the new “energetic” model of the Multi-Dimensional anatomy, every vaccine is a shock that leaves a lasting immaterial mark on the space-time continuum that is our body. This shock can lead to a disharmony in the child and his balance or harmony may never be regained. Dr. Jean Elmiger writing in his book, Rediscovering Real Medicine, thoroughly describes the after-effects of vaccine damage to the body’s energy fields. These vastly more complex understandings are not in any way a part of the research protocols put forth and used by the IOM. We’ve observed these same failures in the attempts to define the diseases arising in the veterans of the Gulf War. These are complex, multi-factorial diseases. The use of old belief systems such as one cause/one disease and the idea that disease is something solely outside and independent of the body no longer apply.

From the above, we can see how futile it is to apply our current scientific models to an understanding of the complex issue of how vaccines may create damage. Dr. Bernard Rimland has collected, since 1964, shall we call it, epidemiological, organismic, and ecological data on vaccines and whether they cause autism. It is clear to Dr. Rimland that vaccines are involved in the cause of autism. In his 2001 paper, What I have learned: Four and a half decades as a parent and researcher, Rimland tells a chilling tale about mainstream medicine’s utter failure to come to grips with a problem that’s clear to everyone else.

The autistic child is riddled with health problems. The chronic yeast and bacteria problems indicate a seriously damaged ecology; the child is not responding well to his environment. This is all due to the toxic nature of all the vaccines, drugs, and environmental pollutants soaking these already compromised children before and since birth.

The Current Approach to Health and Disease Needs Serious Revisions

In summary, all observers of the living organism responding to challenges from environmental assaults understand that vaccines are implicated in the cause of autism. Mainstream medicine has steadfastly ignored these observations. It has, instead, attempted to use outmoded and ineffective so-called “scientific” models to address a problem that cannot possibly be addressed that way. More important, it seems obvious to many observers that even if smacked in the face with the facts, mainstream medicine would ignore them in its efforts to protect itself from change (for many reasons). All thinking persons should realize that the experiment is over: vaccines are implicated in the cause of autism. Fifty years of observations are enough for clarity. Further study is not required about this issue. It’s time to act to protect those yet to come.

Gregory Ellis, PhD, CNS

February 23, 2002

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