CDC: Yellow Fever Vaccine Has “Serious Sometimes Fatal Side Effects” via Children's Health Defense

03/08/2019 09:08

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/the-yellow-fever-vaccine-more-questions-than-answers/ 

 

FEBRUARY 21, 2019

 

CDC:  Yellow Fever vaccine has "serious sometimes fatal side effects"

Vaccine administered to people as young as nine months old

In January, 2019, news outlets reported the death of a leading cancer researcher in the UK, who suffered total organ failure not long after receiving a yellow fever (YF) vaccine. Both the UK and the U.S. recommend YF vaccination for anyone nine months of age or older who is planning to travel to a yellow-fever-endemic country in sub-Saharan Africa or South America.

Public health authorities admit that the YF vaccine—an attenuated live-virus vaccine—can, in “rare” cases, “have serious and sometimes fatal side effects” and that the risks are about four times higher in individuals age 60 or older, but many older travelers continue to be given the vaccine anyway. In the fatal January incident, the deceased scientist was 67 years old; after his death, the medical research institution that employed him instructed The Guardian to amend its news account to say that the death occurred “following,” rather than “as a result of,” yellow fever vaccination.

In the early 2000s, news reporters apparently had a bit more leeway to disclose vaccine risks. A 2001 story about YF-vaccine-related deaths in three countries concluded that the fatalities “underscored yet again that there is no such thing as a perfectly safe vaccine.” A recent search of “yellow fever vaccine adverse events” in PubMed (the National Library of Medicine’s free search engine) pulled up 168 search results for studies published over the past couple of decades. Considering that an estimated 99% of vaccine-related adverse events never even get reported, perhaps it is time to reexamine the yellow fever vaccine’s risks.

Death, madness and organ failure

The UK is no stranger to dramatic stories about YF vaccination gone awry. A former BBC foreign correspondent recently described his journey into psychosis after YF vaccination, noting that others who have contacted him report that they, too, suffered “delusion and hallucinations after having the vaccination.” He received his vaccine in Greece, where, rather unusually, “the doctors…told him they believed he’d had an adverse reaction to the vaccine.” After a difficult period of treatment and eventual recovery, the BBC reporter wrote a book and made a film about the “Kafkaesque” experience...Read the rest of the article here