Posted on 07/07/2002 3:14:48 PM PDT by PatriotReporter
Experts Urge Mass Vaccination for Smallpox Attack
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mass vaccination would save thousands more lives in a smallpox attack than the current limited strategy that has been recommended to the U.S. government, experts said on Sunday.
In a study criticizing the limited vaccination plan, they recommended federal officials be ready to vaccinate millions of people.
"Mass vaccination really leads to fewer deaths than the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( news - web sites)) interim plan," Lawrence Wein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( news - web sites), who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
Besides, he said, if there were a smallpox attack, "I think it highly likely that people would take to the streets to demand vaccination, or would flee," possibly spreading the disease even more widely.
Wein and Edward Kaplan of Yale University, both experts in modeling epidemics, published their study in Tuesday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( news - web sites) and urged the CDC to change its current policy when it issues new guidelines later this year.
Smallpox, once a scourge that killed nearly a third of its victims and scarred the rest, was eradicated in 1979. But some countries, including Iraq and the former Soviet Union, experimented with the virus as a potential germ warfare agent.
Fearful of a smallpox attack, the U.S. government last year ordered millions of doses of smallpox vaccine -- enough, in the words of Health and Human Services ( news - web sites) Secretary Tommy Thompson, to vaccinate "every man, women and child" in the country.
PLANS FOR VACCINATING 500,000 REPORTED
Government advisers last month said a so-called ring vaccination strategy, which would involve finding and vaccinating people who had contact with an infected person, would probably be sufficient in case of an attack. More people could be vaccinated if this approach failed, they said.
They also recommended vaccinating potential first-line responders now as a precaution. On Sunday, The New York Times reported the federal government was planning to vaccinate 500,000 health care and emergency workers soon.
The newspaper quoted federal officials as saying the government was laying plans for a mass vaccination of the population, just in case.
But a U.S. Health and Human Services Department spokesman, Bill Pierce, told Reuters the exact number of those to be vaccinated had not yet been decided.
Pierce said these recommendations were very general and required more work by HHS and the Centers for Disease Control to identify which groups should be vaccinated.
The ring vaccination policy was used in the 1970s to eradicate the virus, which lives only in people, in the last few places where smallpox infection remained.
Kaplan said current policy is based in part on this past success.
"But it is one thing when ring containment means putting a ring around a village ... as opposed to trying to put a ring around New York City," Kaplan said in a telephone interview.
Kaplan and Wein ran a computer model of what would happen if someone used a smallpox weapon against a city of 10 million people. Kaplan told an advisory meeting on smallpox vaccine that an initial 1,000 infections could lead to 97,000 deaths.
SIDE-EFFECTS
Ring vaccination would lead to 4,000 more deaths than mass vaccination would, they predicted -- even taking into account a high rate of side effects from the vaccine.
"We tried to take into account the likely number of people that you would have running around tracing and vaccinating," Kaplan said in a telephone interview.
"What if you can't identify everybody?" People can be ill with smallpox and pass on the virus before they develop the distinctive blisters, Kaplan pointed out. "The disease doesn't stand still and wait for you to intervene."
Since vaccination was scrapped in the United States in 1972, experts assume almost no one has any real immunity any more. This means smallpox, which is highly infectious, could spread like wildfire through the population.
But the current vaccine is based on old technology and is not considered very safe. It has a high rate of side-effects, some of them deadly.
In addition, more people have suppressed immune systems now than in the 1970s, and they could be at special risk not only from the vaccine, but from people recently immunized with it.
Such people include cancer patients being treated with chemotherapy and people infected with the AIDS ( news - web sites) virus.
The current CDC policy, endorsed by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices last month, takes this into account. It calls for quarantining anyone confirmed to have been infected in a smallpox attack.
Anyone who may have had contact with the infected patients would be tracked down and vaccinated
Loook.....right now, the people who need to get vaccinated ARE geting vaccinated. Voluntary vaccinations ARE open to the public.
Slow news day???
The CDC needed to know who needed to be vaccinated first. Obvious answer, ANYONE WHO CAN BE DEFINED IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM AS A FIRST RESPONDER TO AN EMERGENGY. THEY are at the top of the list. The rest of us ...we can wait.
As do I.
Look...if you were a terrorist, looking to infect a large population with smallpox...a population, I might add, which might be largly immune to the bacterium.....how would you do it, especially since we are looking for that sort of thing? As well as suspiciuos prople (racial profiling) suspicious planes (aeronautic profiling)?
Best thing to do would be to infect a human being, and send him or her out amongst us.....
So, the infected him or her gets really sick and dies. That person runs their car into...say ....a tree....on a freeway. They are infected. Whom responds to such things first? The highway patrol, generally....or the volunteer fire rescue crews, whomever gets to the accident first. Whom should be innoculated first?
Obviously, anyone who can be defined as a first responder to any disaster, be they US military, National Guard, piloce, fire-rescue, dr's and all ER staff....in that order....
because...DUH...who is most likely to carry the d@mned infection back home and make their family and neighbors sick??? In addition, I proposed all missionaries be innoculates and classified as first responders. THEN the rest of us. We are less important to the spread of a potential plague then those who are on the periphery and just SCARED of it.
I would VASTLY prefer that the vaccine be produced using private capital with appropriate liablility insurance. I might buy that product in a heartbeat, but my government has said that I can't because of the risks associated with the vaccine, a decision I regard as irresponsible. A private market might get diversified manufacturing capacity up sooner and that would be all to the good (best not to have a single target, no?).
So, what the hell is "nutcase leftist conspiracy nonsense" about that and what evidence do YOU have that I ascribe to whatever theory you think you are talking about?
If there is a conspiracy, then I think it would arise out of Russia (so drop the "lefwing" part). It was they who first proposed that the WHO eradicate smallpox in 1954. When eradication was achieved the WHO (and American leftists) leaned all over the US to destroy its stocks of vaccines and smallpox virus stored at the CDC. The US obviously refused and not without reason as the Soviets were producing weaponized smallpox virus at BioPreperat at that very time. It is interesting that we are so concerned about that now that the vaccinations have worn off, and that we did little about BioPreparat since the collapse of the Soviet Union, statements by Mr. Alibek notwithstanding (though I have no idea how credible he is either).
So I don't think you have any basis for your wild accusations, unless you can show me otherwise, and why would you object me flagging someone who knows more about this than I?
Except that is acceptable to them, they are willing to die, think about it.
Everyone's is....except that it COULDN'T be smallpox....ALL Europeans have an inherant immunity to it. What we should be watching for is government labs broken into, all over the world. Armed guards CAN be a deterrant, can't they?
The complications from those vaccines cost the taxpayers millions.
Anecdote: On a Friday afternoon an elderly friend who had just gotten a swine flu shot called me over to his office and gave me some pure Vermont maple syrup he had gotten from Vermont.
I used it on pancakes over the weekend. Monday I went over to thank him and found out he died over the weekend.
Plenty of vaccinated people developed Guillain-Barréacute; Syndrome (GBS). GBS is a rare paralytic disease, similar to polio, which causes an onset of polyneuritis, or tingling and weakness of the extremities and then some extent of paralysis. Preliminary calculations estimated that while there were 0.7 cases of GBS per million of non-vaccines at this time, there were 8.3 cases per million in vaccines.
Not only this, but those non-vaccines which developed GBS were much more likely to have been sick prior to the syndrome than those who were vaccines, suggesting that the vaccine contained the trigger effect that usually would not have been present in healthy individuals.
Don't mass vaccinate. It is one thing to vaccinate a healthy soldier but to vacinate the entire population is irresponsible.- Tom
It's a good thing that Carter was not re-elected int 1980. He very well might have destroyed our stocks of vaccine and variola.
can and would live on different sides of town ...
btw, am i hearing that the vaccinations we got in the fifties are no longer effective ?
also, should our family GP have access to vaccines, should we want to get the kids jabbed ?
PS, do people under 60 first, and of them, kids first, the most vulnerable first.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.