Page 72 - Winter2020

Vaccination Updates

PERTUSSIS VACCINES: A HISTORICAL AND PRESENT-DAY PERSPECTIVE
By Kendall Nelson, Director, The Greater Good

As far back When my team and I set out to make our major well-documented critique of America’s
as 1933, movie about the vaccine controversy in Amer- mass vaccination program and called for safety
ica, The Greater Good, we knew we had to tell reforms and the human right to informed con-
reports began the story of vaccine safety and informed consent sent to vaccination.
surfacing that champion Barbara Loe Fisher. Forty years ago, For the past four decades, as Fisher has
the whole- Fisher watched her precocious, bright, happy continued to research, analyze and publicly
two-and-a-half-year-old son suffer a convulsion articulate the science, policy, law, ethics and
cell pertussis and collapse into shock and a state of uncon- politics of vaccination, she has become one
vaccine could sciousness within hours of his fourth diphtheria, of the world’s leading non-medical consumer

kill infants whole-cell pertussis and tetanus (DPT) vaccine. advocacy experts on vaccination and human
As a consequence, her son—who had said his rights. President of NVIC since 1993, she served
without first words at seven months and spoke in full as a consumer representative on federal vaccine
warning. sentences by age two—regressed physically, advisory committees and public engagement
mentally and emotionally. Fisher says, he had projects at the Department of Health and Hu-
“become a totally different child.” man Services (HHS) and Institute of Medicine
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In 1982, the Emmy-award-winning televi- for more than twenty years. 4
sion documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette pro-
filed the damaging effects of the highly reactive WHOLE-CELL PERTUSSIS VACCINES
DPT vaccine, but for Fisher and her family, The DPT vaccine that Fisher’s son received
this crucial information, broadcast to millions included a crude whole-cell pertussis compo-
of parents, came too late. For them, life had nent. Although the whole-cell pertussis vac-
changed forever eighteen months previously. cine was licensed in 1914, it was not routinely
She would spend years helping her son cope administered until after 1949, when vaccine
with illnesses and multiple learning disabilities, scientists combined it with diphtheria and
including dyslexia, fine and gross motor skill tetanus vaccines to make the three-in-one DPT
delays, auditory processing and attention deficit shot. By that time, the death rate from the once
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challenges and short-term memory delays so devastating pertussis disease (which peaked in
severe that officials “confined him to a special the 1800s) had already declined by more than
[education] classroom throughout his public 99 percent. 6
school education.” As far back as 1933, reports began surfac-
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After the release of the television documen- ing that the whole-cell pertussis vaccine could
tary, Fisher and other parents of DPT-vaccine- kill infants without warning and, by the 1960s,
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injured children in the Washington, DC area evidence published in the medical literature
came together to found Dissatisfied Parents To- confirmed that the three-in-one DPT vaccine
gether, which would later become the National could cause convulsions and brain damage in
Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). Their children. Concerns continued to grow in the
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aim was to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths 1970s, and by the early 1980s there was little
through public education. In 1985, Fisher was doubt that the whole-cell pertussis vaccine was,
vice president of Dissatisfied Parents Together as Fisher describes it, “the most reactive vaccine
and co-authored her book, DPT: A Shot in the ever given to infants and children, second only
Dark, with Harris L. Coulter (published by to smallpox vaccine.”
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Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). It was the first Fisher and NVIC have published informa-
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70 Wise Traditions WINTER 2020