The HHS / Harvard Pilgrim / Lazarus Study: Part I (The Background)
The Vaccine Study that Should Stop Everyone in their Tracks!
Chapter I: A Short History of Vaccine-Related Adverse Events (AE’s)
To understand the HHS / Harvard Pilgrim / Lazarus study (from now on referred to simply as “Pilgrim”), we have to climb into the time machine. You see, even though the study was published in 2011 and based on data from 2007-2010, we must understand why the study was done in the first place.
Strap in as we set the dial for November 14, 1986 - the day after President Ronald Regan admitted (kind of, sort of) to what would become known as the Iran-Contra Affair. And less than two weeks before ‘America’s Team,’ led by QB Danny White - until White broke his wrist, leaving the hapless Steve Pelluer to take his place - and running backs Herschel Walker & Tony Dorsett (not to mention a defense manned by stalwarts Everson Walls, Bill Bates, Ed ‘Too Tall’ Jones, and Randy White), and coached by the ever-classy Tom Landry, would have their hind ends handed to them on Thanksgiving Day by the Seattle Seahawks, 31 to 14.
What was so special about November 14th, 1986? It was the day that Ronald Regan, a day removed from lying about Iran-Contra, signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) into Law.
And while we will cover this in depth shortly, rest assured that this piece of legislation would more accurately have been called the Big Pharma Liability Protection Act. But to really understand Dr Lazarus’ Pilgrim study, as well as why the NCVIA was needed in the first place, we need to get back into the time machine and go back even further. How far? Let’s go back to May of 1796, when English physician Edward Jenner (1749–1823) began his experiments using cowpox “festerings” in an attempt to prevent smallpox.
Regarding Jenner’s work, reports of AE’s (adverse events / side effects) began emerging immediately from a combination of patients, doctors, collaborators, critics, medical journals, anti-vaccination pamphlets (mostly created by fellow physicians), and government inquiries. Even Jenner’s 1798 book (An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae) delved deeply into this topic. As far as AE’s there were…
Local Effects: Irregular pustules (often livid / blue-tinged) surrounded by erysipelatous (streptococcal-like) inflammation. These frequently turned into phagedenic ulcers (deep, destructive, “eating away” tissue), very painful and slow-healing. Axillary (armpit) tumors / swelling and pain were common.
Systemic Effects: Quickened pulse, shiverings followed by heat, general lassitude, pains in loins/limbs, vomiting, headache, and occasionally delirium. These usually lasted 1–4 days, but could be worse if ulcers were irritated or multiple. He noted: “The system becomes affected... with vomiting... The head is painful, and the patient is now and then even affected with delirium.”
Fatalities: Although Jenner insisted true cowpox caused no fatalities (unlike variolation / smallpox inoculation), he openly admitted ‘variability.’ Some cases had “extensive erysipelatous inflammation,” secondary abscesses, or “spurious” cowpox (from horse grease or non-true sources) that looked similar but failed to protect, leaving people vulnerable to smallpox. He also warned that excessive sores could overwhelm a “delicate constitution.”
And as vaccination against smallpox scaled up, the problems multiplied.
In the London Trials (1799) at the Smallpox Hospital run by Drs. Woodville & Pearson, hundreds were vaccinated, with many developing widespread pustules and fever. In other words, symptoms that looked suspiciously like smallpox. And this did not begin to touch on the issue of “bad arms” - arms that developed strep ulcers and heaven-only-knows what other sorts of infected abscesses (common enough in some localities, they were actually tracked). And speaking of “other” infections, there were scads of others spread via inoculation, including syphilis - see the infamous Rivalta, Italy case, where 44 of 63 vaccinated children developed syphilis, which spread to nurses, parents, and anyone else in close contact.
Jenner and his supporters argued that inoculation with cowpox was much safer than smallpox itself or variolation (an early immunization method used for centuries in Asia, where people were exposed to a smallpox pustule or scab by scratching it into the skin or blowing powdered scabs into the nose, in hopes of creating immunity). To better understand the cowpox / smallpox vaccination issue, the Midwestern Doctor has numerous detailed articles (here & here, here, here, here, and here).
Let’s start heading back to the present, stopping about six months prior to the year 2000 - shortly before Y2K hysteria was reaching maximum crescendo. The graph below is one of the single most telling pieces of evidence you’ll see in a journey across lots of such evidence.
The following is a cherry-picked paragraph from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of July 30, 1999 (Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Control of Infectious Diseases), and goes with the graph below…
“Public health action to control infectious diseases in the 20th century is based on the 19th century discovery of microorganisms as the cause of many serious diseases. Disease control resulted from improvements in sanitation and hygiene, the discovery of antibiotics, and the implementation of universal childhood vaccination programs. In 1962, a federally coordinated vaccination program was established through the passage of the Vaccination Assistance Act–landmark legislation that has been renewed continuously and now supports the purchase and administration of a full range of childhood vaccines.”
What the graph shows is actually devastating to the CDC’s point.
While it’s inarguable that antibiotics saved significant numbers of lives (but not nearly as many as public health and hygiene), it’s not as easy to make the same case concerning vaccines. The needle (no pun inteneded) has barely budged since the late 1950’s - seven decades ago.
By the time the major childhood vaccines arrived, the mortality curve had already fallen to near-baseline levels. In other words, the introduction of mass vaccination programs was messier than the clean victory lap the CDC’s paragraph implied…
Smallpox: Smallpox was mostly gone by 1900, the starting point of the CDC graph.
Salk polio vaccine (1955): Within weeks of licensure, improperly inactivated batches from Cutter Laboratories caused 40,000 cases of polio, paralyzed 200 children, and killed 10. It remains one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in American history (link, link, link).
Salk polio vaccine (1955-1963): The Salk Vaccine (later replaced by Sabin’s version) was contaminated with Simian Virus 40 (SV40), a monkey virus with documented cancer-causing properties. An estimated 98 million Americans were exposed. SV40 has since been found in mesotheliomas, osteosarcomas, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas and other cancers, as well as part of its genetic sequence in the… (link, link, link, link).
Measles vaccine (1963): The original Edmonston-B strain caused fever and rash in 30-40% of recipients and was withdrawn in 1968. Its replacement was withdrawn in 1975. A third version is used today (link, link, link, link).
DPT vaccine (pre-1962 through the 1980s): The old DPT was the ‘Queen Mother’ of documented neurological injuries, seizures, encephalopathy, and permanent brain damage for decades before any official acknowledgment (link, link).
At best, vaccines have not done what’s been claimed of them, and at worst, our national war on germs has produced a great deal of fallout and rotten fruit. How much and how rotten? Enough so that by the time Lea Thompson, a reporter for Washington DC’s WRC-TV (NBC), aired her one-hour documentary (DPT: Vaccine Roulette) on April 19, 1982, a nation largely ignorant to the fact that vaccines could actually cause harm was awakened. Thompson would go on to win the Emmy for Best Documentary.
To understand why this was so epic, you had to have grown up before the internet and the interconnectedness of today’s ‘social media’ world. If your child had seizures and subsequent brain damage after a DPT shot, it was easy for “the system” to downplay it as a rare event - a tragedy that happens to a very few for the good of the many. There were no online support groups, message boards, FB groups, or information at your fingertips. But when Vaccine Roulette aired, people all over the country realized that what had happened to their child was widespread, and not nearly as rare as the ‘trust us’ experts were touting.
In quick succession, we saw the formation of Dissatisfied Parents Together (DPT), the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) by Barbara Loe Fisher (I’ve had the privilege of meeting her), who, in 1984 released her book, DPT: A Shot in the Dark with Dr Harris Coulter whose later offering, 1990’s Vaccination, Social Violence, and Criminality: The Medical Assault on the American Brain, is an absolutely devastating summary of the vaccine industry’s decades-long attack on human neurology (yes, I own both books).
At the same time, the golden boy of that era’s “social media” (TV talk shows), Phil Donahue, ran three different programs on this topic (‘81, ‘83, and ‘85), with guests that included Thompson and the renowned pediatrician, Robert Mendelshon (his book How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor) was our go-to baby shower gift for at least two decades!
Here’s what needs to be understood. These groups were not saying that vaccination should be abandoned. They simply wanted safer vaccines. And they wanted informed consent - doctors warning patients about the dangers their children could face regarding vaccines, the DPT vaccination arguably being the worst at that time. I say ‘arguably’ because AE’s were not limited to the DPT (the MMR has had more than it’s share of issues), although that mantle has since passed to the HPV vaccine, at least among non-mRNA vaccines.
What did this do? It did what all huge revelations in America do - it triggered years of Congressional Hearings on the subject. You know how that works though. Plenty of revelation, but nothing really changes. And on the flip side of the coin, Big Pharma was lobbying Congress for liability relief. They argued that vaccines were ‘unavoidably unsafe’ but ‘necessary for the greater good’. In other words, we all need to be willing to sacrifice our children to prevent diseases that all of us of a certain age grew up with and for the most part considered a normal part of life - chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, flu, etc.
Chapter II: Vaccine Court and the National Childhood Vaccination Act of 1986
The four major players in the vaccine industry - Wyeth & Lederle (both are part of Pfizer today), Connaught (part of Sanofi today), and Merck - went to Congress with what amounted to an extortion plan. They said you either give us a complete 100% liability shield for our vaccines or we stop making them.
The interesting part of this story is that while they were busy telling Congress that vaccine manufacturers were leaving the market and that per-dose pricing had skyrocketed, in some cases by 10,000%, they were telling the Securities and Exchange Commission something totally different, claiming to their investors that lawsuits and fewer manufacturers were having ZERO effect on profits.
Congress’s biggest defender of the injured children and most vocal supporter of vaccine reform was California representative Henry Waxman (D), one of the original bill’s sponsors. The early legislative push came from an unlikely alliance of could only be described as strange bedfellows. A small group of parents of brain-damaged children, two members of Congress whose own families had been touched by vaccine injury (Dan Burton being the most well known), and the American Academy of Pediatrics. As you might imagine, there were many competing bills, each with its own unique take on what the program should look like. And of course, there was treachery between the sheets.
Waxman, not surprisingly, followed the money. The “Alliance” lost support of the American Academy of Pediatrics (an organization that shares more in common with lobbyist groups than healthcare - link, link), and essentially collapsed. The parents’ groups did not have the financial juice to push their version of the bill, and walla, We-The-People ended up with something totally different from what was originally planned. Something that gave industry a full-blown liability shield. And more - much more. After all, when it comes to protecting industry, It’s Money that Matters!
I asked Claude to summarize a few articles on this subject from the NVIC (Barbara Loe Fisher herself is the mother of a severely DPT-damaged child)…
Before Congress ever voted on the 1986 Act, vaccine manufacturers had already spent a decade quietly engineering an information blackout. Nearly every vaccine injury lawsuit settled at the courthouse steps — for pennies, and always with one non-negotiable condition: seal the records. Internal memos, safety data, lot-specific reaction records, everything uncovered in discovery — buried. By the time Congress sat down to write the law, the full picture of what manufacturers knew and when they knew it was locked away in hundreds of sealed court files across the country. The information vacuum Congress legislated in wasn't an accident. The industry built it, one settlement at a time.
SIDE NOTE: I happen to know a family whose child was severely injured by a DPT vaccine, and was one of the last lawsuits to be filed under the old rules, before the right to file lawsuits was completely taken away. Discussing this with them one day, they told me that Discovery consisted of dump truck loads of loose papers dumped into a large warehouse. There’s your information - have fun with it. Their attorney hired people to organize the material, and then hired speed-readers to read it all (you will appreciate that fact Dr ML!), eventually winning the case in the early 1990’s.
Although Reagan signed The Act in November of ‘86, in 1987, without the knowledge of parents of vaccine-injured children who had worked with Congress on the Act, medical trade lobbyists managed to clandestinely attach an amendment to the end-of-year Omnibus budget bill that shielded negligent doctors and other vaccine administrators from medical malpractice vaccine injury lawsuits. The final piece of Big Pharma’s shield of protection was completed by the Supreme Court a quarter century later, in 2011.
In the Bruesewitz case (link, link), internal Wyeth / Lederle documents emerged showing that company representatives had evaluated developing a safer pertussis component and concluded it was "not worth it for the total market” (both companies became part of ‘Fizzer’ in 2009). They knew their vaccine caused more adverse reactions than alternatives, but due to the cost, chose not to fix it.
When the case reached the SCOTUS in 2011, the 6-2 majority (written by Scalia) ruled that the 1986 Act shielded manufacturers from all design-defect liability. Period. Justice Sotomayor dissented, correctly noting that the Act's legislative history showed Congress never intended that result - that the liability shield was meant only for truly unavoidable side effects. Although the Childhood Vaccine Protection Act’s legislative record backed her position, the majority sided with industry.
When the dust settled, worried parents got VAERS (which, as you’ll see momentarily, might just be the world’s largest turd), a limited warning insert, and a compensation court that tends to fight petitioners every step of the way, only paying out after years of litigation - litigation that was supposed to be quick, inexpensive, and non-traumatic (not to mention, damages above costs were capped at $250,000). Industry got a guaranteed market via mandatory school-attendance vaccine requirements, freedom from design-defect liability, sealed discovery, no competitive pressure to create safer vaccines, and ultimately, Supreme Court protection. Oh, and by 2012, prices had exploded. Can anyone say “cash cow”? No wonder the childhood schedule has blown up.
A final note on this topic before moving forward. Part II of this series - VAERS and the nuts and bolts of Pilgrim - will not make sense without understanding the following paragraph…
The “Compensation Court” is officially titled the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), although everyone calls it by its nickname - Vaccine Court. How bad is the VICP? A search of MSM outlets reveals the list is virtually endless, including…
60 Minutes (in October of last year)
New England Journal of Medicine
Harvard Journal on Legislation
Documentaries on all three networks.
Books (The Vaccine Court: The Dark Truth of America’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury, and Adverse Events Associated with Childhood Vaccines: Evidence Bearing on Causality (1994) National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are three of dozens).
RFK Jr referred to the ‘Vaccine Court’ as “a disaster” plagued by “denial and systematic cruelty.” A former expert witness published a first-person account of being approached with what he described as a bribe by a Special Master. The GAO has investigated it. The Congressional Research Service has flagged its structural failures. And for those of you interested in a “Top-100” list…
Why have I given you so much background? Because without it, you cannot begin to understand the shocking significance of what’s come to be known as the HHS / Harvard Pilgrim / Lazarus study. Just hit the subscribe button, and you’ll find it in your inbox in the next day or two…