CMSRI: On Vaccines, Adjuvants and Autoimmunity

By Celeste McGovern

Immunologists survey the research and it’s not reassuring

Add one more item to the growing stack of published medical literature linking vaccines to the current explosion of autoimmune diseases from skin afflictions to neurological disorders. A paper published online this month in the journal Pharmacological Research is an international team of immunologists’ roundup of current findings on vaccine-induced disease — and their conclusions are in sharp contrast to public health’s “safe and effective” mantra that denies any such connection.

“Vaccines and autoimmunity are linked fields,” state the authors led by Luísa Eça Guimarães of the Zabludowicz Center for Autoimmune Diseases in Tel-Hashomer, Israel. Just as natural infections can sometimes induce autoimmune disease, so can vaccination induce autoimmunity that “may be severe and fatal.”

Autoimmunity can manifest acutely, as encephalitis for example, or in a wide range of disfiguring and debilitating immune-mediated illnesses from alopecia to multiple sclerosis. These are soaring globally and together affect as many as one in five Americans today. Officials like those at the National Institutes for Health and the Centers for Disease Control claim some mysterious unidentified “environmental” factors must be responsible for the epidemic, but they obstinately refuse to look at the ever-increasing schedule of injected drugs that target the immune system.

In the paper, the immunologists review current research and case studies of vaccine-induced autoimmunity in light of the new the concept of Autoimmune Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants introduced by leading immunologist Yehuda Shoenfeld in 2011. The ASIA model explains adverse events that have been linked to vaccination since it began according to new understandings of the mechanisms by which vaccine ingredients called adjuvants take effect. Adjuvants are designed to stimulate the immune system but in some individuals can trigger a cascade of immune reactions and symptoms (ASIA) that can eventually manifest as overt autoimmune disease.

Read the entire article here.