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Here for your convenience is the relevant excerpt from that article exposing Hotez's lies in great detail. For full references, see the original article at the link above.
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Whereas Hotez would have his readers believe that the risk of dying as a result of getting the measles vaccine is virtually zero and unquestionably lower than the risk of dying if left unvaccinated, the truth is that we don’t know because clinical trials were never done to determine the vaccine’s effect on overall mortality.
This is a problem with all vaccines. An expert review published in June 2019 expressed the concern that “it is impossible to predict what happens in terms of susceptibility to infections in general, of all types, when the immune system is being stimulated through vaccination”.
There are observational studies that have been done in African countries looking at this question. Studies have found the measles vaccine to be associated with a decreased rate of childhood mortality that cannot be attributed to prevention of measles alone. In fact, this has been observed even in areas with no acute measles mortality.
Hotez alludes to this body of research when he claims that “the measles virus can suppress the immune system, rendering children susceptible to serious infections like pneumonia and the flu.”
He’s referring to the hypothesis of measles “immune amnesia”, which was conceived to try to explain the observation of an association between vaccination and decreased mortality from other diseases. It has been known since the pre-vaccine era that measles can cause a temporary suppression of the immune system that increases the risk of secondary infections. (Hotez’s graphic states that the “most common cause of death” is pneumonia, for example, which in many cases is caused not by the measles virus itself but by some secondary infection.) The “immune amnesia” hypothesis is that measles does not just cause a temporary immunosuppression but a long-term effect that may “wipe out” acquired immunity to other infectious diseases.
One problem with this hypothesis is that it’s based on the additional observation that measles virus infection results in a depletion of antibodies and the B-cells that make them. In the paradigm of vaccination, this would seem to equate to an elimination of immunity. Indeed, for the purposes of vaccine licensure, the production of antibodies is treated as equivalent to immunity. The problem with this framework is that antibodies are neither always sufficient nor even necessary for the development of immunity.
Measles itself happens to provide a perfect example of that. Children with a disorder rendering their immune system incapable of producing a protective level of antibodies are still protected from measles due to another branch of the immune system known as cell-mediated immunity. Children suffering from deficits in cell-mediated immunity, on the other hand, can still die of measles despite producing levels of antibodies considered “protective”.
A study published in BMJ Open in 2016 emphasized another major problem with the “immune amnesia” hypothesis, which is that “all available studies—including the present one—suggest lower mortality rather than excess mortality among those who survive the acute phase of measles infection.”
To repeat: what studies show is that measles infection is associated with a lower risk of dying from other diseases, not a higher risk as assumed under the “immune amnesia” hypothesis.
In other words, while the live virus vaccine seems to train the immune system in ways that provide “non-specific” benefits, so does infection with the wild virus. This should not be too surprising since the vaccine is intended to cause an immune response similar to that caused by infection. As a 2002 study published in the journal Vaccine observed, in populations where measles is a “mild disease”, which certainly includes the US, “measles infection may be associated with better overall survival than no measles infection.” Studies indicate that “lower post-measles mortality compensates for acute measles mortality and as a consequence, measles infection has a lower than expected overall impact on survival.”
In fact, apart from training the immune system to protect the host from other pathogens, measles infection during childhood has been associated with a decreased risk of numerous other diseases later in life, including degenerative bone disease, certain tumors, Parkinson’s disease, allergic disease, chronic lymphoid leukemia, both non-Hodgkin lymphoma and Hodgkin lymphoma, and cardiovascular disease.
In another paper published in Expert Review of Vaccines in 2018, top researchers in the field of “non-specific effects” of vaccines once again emphasized that a fundamental problem with the “immune amnesia” hypothesis is that, “in the five published studies which examined whether post-measles infection is associated with long-term excess mortality, there is a trend towards lower subsequent mortality for individuals who survived acute measles infection.”
The authors of that paper also stressed that “vaccines need to be evaluated for their effects on overall health”, which would require a shift from the existing outdated paradigm in which vaccine safety science and the regulatory apparatus of the US government is stuck.
And whereas the live virus measles vaccine seems to train the immune system in beneficial ways similar to measles infection, non-live vaccines have been associated with detrimental non-specific effects. The diphtheria, tetanus, and whole cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine, for instance, which is the most widely used vaccine in the world, has been associated with a significantly increased risk of childhood death. (The DTP vaccine has been replaced in the US with an acellular pertussis vaccine, DTaP, which is also a non-live vaccine.)
In a review published last year, Peter Aaby and Christine Benn, two leading researchers in this field involved in the aforementioned research, once again pointed out that, contrary to the “immune amnesia” hypothesis, studies rather have “suggested that measles infection could have a beneficial effect on survival” and hence have “refuted the hypothesis”.
As Christine Benn has also remarked with respect to that recent review, “No vaccines have been studied for their non-specific effects on overall health, and before we have examined these, we cannot actually determine that the vaccines are safe.”
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