by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
NBC News this week reported whooping cough “rising sharply” in some countries and quoted experts warning pregnant moms and parents to vaccinate their kids and adults to get boosters. Experts interviewed by The Defender said the vaccines don’t prevent transmission and come with dangerous side effects.
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“We are not seeing anything unusual,” Jasmine Reed, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson, told the news outlet.
However, in the same article — “Whooping Cough Rising in Some Countries. Why You May Need a Booster” — NBC contributor Kaitlin Sullivan reported that “outbreaks in Europe, Asia and parts of the U.S. should be a reminder to get vaccinated, experts say.”
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told NBC the current situation “won’t turn into a pandemic because we have a highly vaccinated population.”
Schaffner added: “However, let’s make sure that pregnant people get vaccinated, that babies are vaccinated on schedule, and the rest of us take the Tdap vaccine every 10 years.”
This is especially necessary to protect infants, who are especially vulnerable to the otherwise typically mild illness, NBC reported.
Experts told The Defender they thought the NBC report was unnecessarily alarming, cited outdated methods for protecting babies, and failed to consider serious and well-known concerns with the safety and efficacy of DTaP and Tdap vaccines.
Pertussis vaccines don’t prevent transmission
Dr. Bob Sears, author of “The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child,” told The Defender that studies have shown the pertussis vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission.
“There’s no medical or scientific reason to advise giving the vaccine to any group of people for the purpose of preventing transmission to others,” Sears said.
He added:
“We have whooping cough in our society simply because this is one of several vaccines that doesn’t reduce the spread of its disease. The vaccine simply doesn’t work that way, and no amount of scientific hope or wishful thinking will change that.”
The United Kingdom saw an increase in whooping cough cases in January. According to The BMJ, the spike seen there also occurred in other European countries, but the outbreak primarily affected people ages 15 and older, who are not at high risk from the illness. Only 4% of cases in the recent spike were in infants.
NBC also reported that China had a 15-fold increase in cases in January, part of a variable epidemiology of the disease seen over the last 10 years. That increase amounted to 15,275 cases among a population of over 1.4 billion people.
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told NBC that the outbreaks and mild isolated cases the agency reported in the San Francisco Bay area, Hawaii and New York are normal and something “we expect to see every year.”
Whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory illness that manifests as a cold in most people, but it can be serious for newborns who have a very narrow trachea, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internal medicine physician, told The Defender.
Deaths from pertussis are extremely rare, averaging about 10 per year. About 85% of deaths happen in children under two months of age — before babies are even eligible to begin the pertussis vaccination.
Nass said pertussis is extremely common and endemic in the U.S. It tends to be misdiagnosed as cold or flu and medical attention is rarely sought, except for babies.
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