Yesterday, British multimedia company National World reported that whooping cough infections have risen across the UK in the first quarter of 2024.
National World is not the only media outlet to begin a fear campaign about whooping cough. At the time of writing, a quick internet search for “whooping cough” returned 27 corporate media reports and a press release from the UK government in the last week alone. In total, Ground News has aggregated 255 news stories that have been published about Whooping Cough in the past 3 months.
The reason for the campaign can be summed up in one sentence. “The best way to prevent the 100 day cough,” National World said, “is to be fully vaccinated.”
However, as Dr. Vernon Coleman points out, the story of the whooping cough vaccine provides a remarkable example of dishonesty and deceit in medicine.
Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, I was a passionate critic of a number of vaccines – most notably the whooping cough vaccine.
The story of the whooping cough vaccine provides us with a remarkable example of dishonesty and deceit in medicine.
There has been controversy about the whooping cough vaccine for many years but in the UK, the Department of Health and Social Security has consistently managed to convince the majority of medical and nursing staff to support the official line that the vaccine is both safe and effective. The official line has for years paid little attention to the facts. Put bluntly, successive governments have consistently lied about the risks and problems associated with the whooping cough vaccine.
I will explain exactly why I think that governments have lied to their employers (the public) a little later. For the time being I would like to concentrate on the history.
The first point that should be made is that although official spokesmen claim otherwise, I don’t believe the whooping cough vaccine has ever had a significant influence on the number of children dying from whooping cough. The dramatic fall in the number of deaths caused by the disease came well before the vaccine was widely available and was, historians agree, the result of improved public health measures and the use of antibiotics.
It was in 1957 that the whooping cough vaccine was first introduced nationally in Britain – although the vaccine was tried out in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. But the incidence of whooping cough, and the number of children dying from the disease, had both fallen very considerably well before 1957. So, for example, while doctors reported 170,000 cases of whooping cough in 1950, they reported only about 80,000 cases in 1955. The introduction of the vaccine really didn’t make very much, if any, difference to the fall in the incidence of the disease. Thirty years after the introduction of the vaccine, whooping cough cases were still running at about 1,000 a week in Britain.
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