If you have chosen for your children or yourself not to get the three thousand vaccines and four trillion boosters recommended by the establishment, you’ve probably heard the ringing refrain that you are damaging herd immunity and damaging the country’s immunological complexion. But recent studies are casting a shadow of doubt on herd immunity theory:

Perhaps with the good intention to immediately put an end to any risk of congenital rubella in their community, elementary-school children were vaccinated en mass against rubella in 1970 in Casper, Wyoming.  Ironically, nine months after this local vaccination campaign, an outbreak of rubella hit Casper. The herd-immunity effect did not materialize and the outbreak involved over one thousand cases and reached several pregnant women.

The perplexed authors of the study describing this outbreak wrote: “The concept that a highly immune group of pre-pubertal children will prevent the spread of rubella in the rest of the community was shown by this epidemic not always to be valid.”¹

The belief in herd immunity has no doubt been influencing vaccine-related legislation in many U.S. states and other countries.  This notion is used as a trump card to justify and mandate legal measures aiming to increase vaccination compliance.  An implicit assumption is that liberal vaccine exemptions somehow compromise this precious herd immunity, which the public-health authorities strive to establish and maintain via vaccination.

This is not an isolated case. Herd immunity has been challenged by a huge number of cases that the medical establishment has decided to ignore. The fact is that modern vaccinations do not necessarily or reliably grant immunity. In other words, people who have been vaccinated can still get the disease. Why?

Modern vaccinations use highly attenuated and generally dead cultures. In studies with rats, only live culture vaccines offered long-term immunity. So the only reliable method to gain immunity is by either contracting a disease or being vaccinated with a milder, but still live, version of it. There just isn’t any substitute for your body actually having to fight a form of the actual disease.

The main reason for the ineffectiveness of modern vaccines has a lot to do with how they are produced, stored, and administered. If you have a vaccine schedule like we have in the States, it is very inconvenient and expensive to produce live culture vaccines. Vaccines in our day need to be readily available in large numbers and they have to last nearly forever. Which is not conducive to producing truly effective vaccines with minimal toxicological side effects.

It is true that diseases have been largely eradicated in the age of vaccines, so what explains this decline if not the increased usage of vaccines? Interestingly, diseases were already on the decline in the West before the modern vaccine regimen became standard medical practice:

The main advances in combating disease over 200 years have been better food and clean drinking water.  Improved sanitation, less overcrowded and better living conditions also contribute.

At the end of the day, vaccines prove effective when they are administered properly, but they do not have the miraculous power to rid the world of disease. Smallpox, for instance, was largely eradicated in the West during the era of vaccines, but even if you wanted to give all the credit to the smallpox vaccination, you must understand that it has little in common with modern vaccines. It was not a modern non-perishable, dead culture solution. It was developed from cowpox, and was almost always made from a live, though attenuated, culture. Modern vaccines are not similarly developed, and consequently, they are not nearly as effective. The most recent flu vaccine had a dismal 23% effectiveness. In an attempt to make a vaccine that won’t make you sick, we have created vaccines that don’t work.

Added to this, the much-lauded eradication of smallpox (and polio, for that matter) also coincided with vastly improved nutrition, clean water, and living conditions. Not to mention hygienic advances spurred on by germ theory. Correlation is not causation. And though there has been little evidence to bolster the herd immunity concept, there has been no shortage of evidence that herd immunity, at least regarding modern vaccines, is a myth. It is a very profitable myth for the medical establishment and the civil government. But it is a myth nonetheless.

There is much debate on this issue, and there is a huge amount of “evidence” on both sides. But I think it is necessary to allow parents to make these decisions for their own families without guilting them with puffed-up theories on herd immunity. On general principle, I’m wary in any area where corporate interests, overbearing intellectual establishments, or the civil government trump personal choice and responsibility.