Old Vets, New Vaccines - The Debate
Project 2001 - Shots

Let me preface this by stating that most vets are good people who care deeply about animals.  Like doctors, they have to earn a living in a suit-happy society and like most of us, they want to make as much as possible with the least effort.  The problem is that vets and doctors are becoming more and more controlled by big business.  Business provides certain doctors with computers and the programs that run them.  Business subsidizes universities and supplies the text and tools which influence students when they leave college.  What used to be a symbiotic relationship that enabled development and research has largely turned into a profit-driven scheme to control medical practitioners at every level.

Did you know that a whole new profession has emerged wherein the drug companies employ special companies to link them with doctors who have a large patient base that can be persuaded to participate in prescription trials?  Have you seen the ads on TV encouraging you to be one of the lucky ones and ask your doctor about XYZ?  OK, then what do you think your best brood bitch or that answer-to-your-dreams special looks like to a hungry drug company?

None of us relate to big business duplicity until someone we know is killed because management knowingly sent a death trap onto the highway.  We now know how the tobacco companies suppressed irrefutable evidence that smoking can kill us. The knowledge held by tobacco execs was so closely guarded that even doctors used to smoke heavily.  One dying patient said she “thought the government protected us.”  So much for big business and government.  Neither are looking out of us.

We don’t know much about treatments and medications either.  Most of us have been around long enough to seek out the best vets for our dogs but how many times have you been handed off to the new partner and found yourself wondering where that person got an education?  Maybe it is just a sign of the times.  Two of my vet-friends are only a store front.  They have visiting ophthalmologists, cardiologists, even surgeons.  One friend proudly says she doesn’t even do spay and neuters.  She just schedules them for the rotating surgeon and hands the bother of after-hours off to the emergency clinic.  She says she now “has a life” and I guess I understand....

I remember every one of our great vets.  Together we learned things.  Clifton Hart taught me how to sew up a horse and I taught him how to read a dog.  One New Year’s day while waiting for my injury-prone klutzy stallion to go down, we recalled visits on Christmas day, the 4^th, and Thanksgiving morning.  The horse finally gave in and as we rolled him, we remembered the Easter Sunday when he’d missed the egg hunt with his grandkids because my too-hot game horse knocked down the fence instead of barrels. Dr. Hart is a dinosaur.  Totally unlike many of today’s bright young vets who are more responsive to procedure and profit than to patients.  The ones that have computers instead of compassion.  Supply rooms instead of satchels.

It is the not-so-pretty side of medical and veterinary knowledge and the business end of operating a successful practice.  Doctors once considered leeches a sure ‘nuff cure-all.  Bleeding patients to within a quart of their lives was common.  Pretty gruesome but no less so than outdated radical mastectomy and automatic prostate removal.

There are millions of ulcer surgery victims walking around today just like Bill Andrews – with only part of a stomach.  Doctors were taught to maintain patients on expensive prescriptions for as long as possible – and then use the knife.  After all, not one prescription ever really cured an ulcer!  Hundreds of thousands of pharma­ceutical victims could have been spared if medical universities and drug companies had listened to one small voice who, thank God! would not be silenced.  After being derided, scorned, personally and professionally challenged, finally, the Australian researcher’s persistence paid off.  When the truth began leaking to mainstream media, was it coincidence that the “newly discovered” cause of ulcers was immediately followed by release of a cure for pylori bacteria?  One slight change and a patent-expired product became a new prescription.  Millions of people needlessly endured horrid physical and emotional side effects due to suppression of an existing cure for a profitable disease.

The growing practice of shoving drugs or vaccines at every problem will do even more harm.  If you understand how seriously profit affects human medicine, then you can look at the vaccination hype with 20/20 vision.  How many remember the Parvo outbreak?  Dates you doesn’t it?  Well, then you remember that it supposedly erupted from the Collie Specialty.  Sure.  And spread almost simultaneously around the globe.  Impossible!  (Unlike the possible rapid spread of human virus, millions of potential host-dogs don’t jet all over the world every day.)  There was a flurry of medically sound veterinary articles that espoused the laboratory-created theory but they were soon drowned out by press releases espousing the spontaneous outbreak theory.

A grateful public rushed to grab the first available vaccine to protect their pets from the new and dreaded virus.  Those vaccines caused reproductive problems but the only people who knew it were breeders and breeder vets.  The good practitioner who vaccinated sterilized pets had no reason to care about reproductive problems, he was just glad to have a new vaccine and new clients coming through the door to get it!

I wrote for The Dog back then, the weekly predecessor of Ric’s old Canine Chronicle.  Dr. Erbeck was the veterinary columnist.  We both wrote about Parvo but he provided all the technical data and was one of the vets who speculated that it was in fact a laboratory mutation.  Our reader survey generated a flood of reports that undeniably linked reproductive problems to the hastily released feline distemper vaccine (for parvo) and the subsequently approved canine derivative parvo vaccine. If in fact the creation of parvo virus it was a marketing strategy, it was inconceivably cruel but totally successful.  If it was only a laboratory mistake, it was still enormously profitable and set the stage for a host of subsequent frightful new diseases which are immediately followed by the panacea.

For example, there were medically sound questions about the efficacy and need for Lyme Disease vaccine.  First the big scare, carefully placed news releases in the doggy press. Then, conveniently, a vaccine.  One little glitch.  One pharmaceutical company charged its competitor with marketing a fake vaccine!  Fur flew.  Sort of a ho-hum repetition of the scandals surrounding feline leukemia vaccine.  By the way, in verifying and refreshing my memory, I just spoke with a vet friend.  She told me that some of the newer vaccines are labeled as “aids in the prevention of” which sounds a lot like the disclaimers on most wormers.  Like selling birth control that might work.

The latest pitch as seen on Animal Planet, is a vaccine for giardia!  In nearly forty years of multiple-dog ownership and litters, we have had one, repeat – one case of giardia!  I have been told by a doctor-friend that it is more common in the municipal water supplies and can be a real problem for pregnant women.  OK, so why not a vaccine for people first???  I’ll leave you to speculate the dark and devious answer to that.  Is it because a vaccine won’t work?  Or maybe it will and our dogs have become “clinical trials”?  What?

Dr. Pitcairn, a widely respected holistic veterinarian said “We do see a number of health problems that we associate with vaccines, (often) having to do with immune problems or allergies.”  He also points out “It also seems that animals become more susceptible to other infections, so that a cat that gets the feline leukemia vaccine might come down a month later with FIP.  There is some evidence reported in the veterinary literature that after a vaccine, the immune system weakens or the animal is more susceptible to diseases of other sorts.”

One of the worlds greatest authorities on vaccines Dr. Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) cautioned about over-use.  He also cited examples of rabies vaccine damage and espoused the “herd immunization” theory which is simple.  Vaccinate one cow and she sheds the virus that then immunizes ten cows.  Problem with that theory is obvious.  If actually applied, it would cut drug company profit by 90%.....

There are hundreds of references in medical reports relating to humans that point out the rise in diseases such as Hepatitis A, B, and the epidemic rise of Hepatitis C.  Unbelievably, the highest number of deaths ever recorded from tuberculosis was in 1998!  Where has science taken us?  Malaria still claims over three million victims yearly.  Well the list goes on but the point is that virus mutate and they do so when artificially challenged.  Keeping ahead of the nightmare with vaccines and drugs is a profitable but hopeless task for the pharmaceutical industry.

The simple truth is – the more we vaccinate, the more the virus mutates.  The more we treat with antibiotics, the more resistant become the bacteria. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take advantage of the marvels of modern medicine.  After all, we have come a long way from using leeches and castor oil for disease!  But we must use common sense and logic.  Take time to find out if there might be an alternative treatment without risky side effects.  And keep in mind that the medical establishment has a clear history of putting a damper on non-surgical treatments or those that would not be protected by patent rights.

       Copyright © 1999 Barbara J. Andrews - All rights reserved.  Except for brief quotations with source provided, no portions thereof may be stored or reprinted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without prior express written consent of Barbara J. Andrews OBJ@OBJdogs.com or contact@thedogplace.org

    reprint Aug. 1999

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