The Truth About Whooping Cough in the U.S.

Reprinted from original article, with permission from Barbara Loe Fisher

Once again, this year Americans are being warned that B. pertussis whooping cough cases are on the rise and society is being endangered by parents who don’t vaccinate their children. ^{1  2 3 4 5} That myth goes back to the early 1980’s, when parents of DPT vaccine injured children in the U.S. were calling for a less reactive pertussis vaccine because our children were dying and being brain injured by the crude whole cell pertussis vaccine, ^{6 7} an especially toxic vaccine that is still being given today in some other countries. ⁸

In the late 20^th century we were accused of causing whooping cough outbreaks just by talking about crippling DPT vaccine reactions, ⁹ very similar to the accusations leveled against people who talked about crippling COVID shot reactions that led to widespread censorship of freedom of speech in the 21^st century. ^{10 11 12 13}

Back in the 1980s, while we were researching the medical literature and learning about how DPT vaccine could kill and disable children, we were also discovering that whole cell pertussis vaccine was not reliably preventing infection with or transmission of B pertussis that causes whooping cough. ¹⁴ In the early 1980s, scientists were reporting that whole cell pertussis vaccine acquired immunity lasted only about two to five years, and whooping cough was circulating in countries with 90 to 95 percent vaccination rates, including in people showing few or no symptoms. ^{15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22}

Cases of asymptomatic transmission of whooping cough were not being counted in official pertussis statistics in the 1980s when nearly every child in the U.S. was getting four or five doses of whole cell pertussis vaccine. ²³ And today, cases of asymptomatic whooping cough in children and adults, who have gotten five to seven doses of acellular pertussis vaccine, are not being counted either. ²⁴

Public health officials and doctors continue to insist publicly that vaccines do prevent infection and transmission of disease. ^{25 26} In fact, the utilitarian rationale for mandatory vaccination laws is based on the premise that everyone must be forced to get vaccinated, that it is our moral obligation to be willing to sacrifice our lives or the lives of our children by risking a disabling or life-ending vaccine reaction for the greater good of society. ^{27 28 29} The argument is that forcing everyone to get vaccinated creates “herd” or “community” immunity,^{30 31} and society is protected from infection and transmission of diseases, which public health officials always claim have more serious and frequent complications than vaccines. ³²

So the scientific and moral rationale for mandatory vaccination rises or falls on whether or not vaccines reliably prevent infection with and transmission of diseases caused by microbes.

During the coronavirus pandemic declaration in 2020, public health officials and lawmakers mandating the COVID shot insisted that none of us would get sick or make other people sick if we rolled up our sleeves and got COVID shots. ^{33 34 35} But soon it became painfully clear that the mRNA biological product labeled a COVID vaccine did not prevent the disease, ³⁶ no matter how many COVID shots a person got, ³⁷ and the risks for heart and brain inflammation were significant.^{38 39 40 41}

Infectious microbes adapt to survive and circulate in human and animal hosts. ^{42 43} The truth is that you can get vaccinated according to the CDC’s recommended schedule and still get pertussis, ⁴⁴ measles, ^{45 46} mumps, ⁴⁷ influenza ⁴⁸ and other vaccine targeted diseases but only show few symptoms or no symptoms at all.  Vaccinated and unvaccinated people can also transmit infection to other vaccinated and unvaccinated people, even as there is mounting evidence that a natural infection often provides a more robust and longer lasting immunity than a vaccine. ^{49 50 51} Pertussis is an excellent example.

Since 1986, I have been talking about the fact that pertussis vaccine does not reliably prevent infection and transmission of whooping cough. In 1986, when our organization –  then known as Dissatisfied Parents Together (DPT) – held the first public demonstration in front of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta to protest the reactivity of whole cell pertussis vaccine, I gave an oral presentation to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) summarizing an investigation I had conducted into DPT vaccine failures in eight states reporting whooping cough outbreaks. I presented data obtained from the eight state health departments, which revealed that in six out of eight states more than half of the reported cases of whooping cough in children and adults had been vaccinated. In one state, more than 70 percent of the whooping cough cases with a known vaccination history had received three or more DPT shots. ⁵²

Time to Dispel Myths and Lies About Pertussis and Pertussis Vaccines

What’s old is new, and it is time to dispel the myths and lies being told about the old whole cell and newer acellular pertussis vaccines.

• FACT: Both the highly reactive whole cell DPT vaccine licensed 1948,  ⁵³  and the less reactive acellular DTaP vaccine licensed in 1996 for infants ⁵⁴ can fail to prevent infection and transmission. ⁵⁵ Those two vaccines typically provide two to five years of temporary vaccine acquired immunity – at best lasting about 12 years; ^{56 57 58}

• FACT: Natural infection with B. pertussis often produces a more robust and longer lasting immunity of between four and 20 years – at best 30 to 70 years; ⁵⁹

• FACT: An unknown number of vaccinated children and adults – perhaps millions – are silently infected with pertussis in the U.S. every year and show few or no symptoms and doctors do not identify those cases, which means those cases are not reported to the government; [60 ⁶¹

• FACT: In response to mass pertussis vaccination campaigns beginning in the 1950s, the B. pertussis microbe evolved first to evade whole cell pertussis vaccines in the 1980s and, in the 1990s, that evolution accelerated to evade acellular pertussis vaccines.  ⁶²

For the rest of the story in more detail (and the tremendous list of references), please read the original article here.

It includes:

• the history of high child vaccination rates for the last 35 years

• the licensing of DTaP in 1996 for US babies

• and so much more.