The truth about the Polio Vaccine

How safe is it really? And why are children still supposed to get four doses of it when it doesn't prevent infection or spread of the virus that causes polio?

The recent dust-up over the polio vaccine reminded me that it was the polio vaccine that first alerted me to the vaccine issue — or, I should say, the issue with vaccines.

It was 2009. I was living in Key West, where I’d been working as a journalist for the Miami Herald Company, and I was pregnant.

And because I knew I was going to have to soon be making the decision about vaccination for the baby, I decided I’d better look into the vaccine issue for myself.

There wasn’t really a chance that I was just going to “trust the doctors.”

Working at U.S. News & World Report a few years earlier, and then as the editor of a small-town newspaper in New York, I’d trained myself to check into everything, to run everything back to its source, and to never, ever take anyone’s word for it when it came to something important.

But at the outset, before doing any deep reading, my general feeling was that vaccines were probably safe and beneficial and that the people who thought otherwise were mistaken, or crazy.

I was aware of the Andrew Wakefield story and comedian Jenny McCarthy, that she was convinced the MMR vaccine had caused her son’s autism. But I think I generally believed what had been reported about Dr. Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist, which is that he’d committed fraud or something like it. And I assumed that Jenny McCarthy was probably a little loony. She was a celebrity, after all.

But in the main, my basis for assuming vaccines were generally good and safe was that if vaccines were really maiming and killing children and causing more harm than good, the number of people who would have to be “in” on the conspiracy would be so great that they wouldn’t be able to keep the whole evil scheme under wraps. And also, it made no sense to claim that pediatricians would do something to cause harm to their tiny patients. Why would they?

It was with this frame of mind that I began to do a little reading.

And what I found shocked me.

The first thing I read was an article in Mothering magazine written by a writer named Jennifer Margulis. In the article, Margulis told of her awakening to the vaccine issue after she gave birth to her first child in the hospital and got a nasty attitude from the nurse when she said no to the Hepatitis B vaccine, questioning why it would be necessary to give a vaccine to a newborn baby to protect against something only a prostitute or a heroin addict could get.

And she talked about what she’d found out about the polio vaccine — that there was zero possibility that an American child could contract polio.

I went and pulled up the CDC’s own data and saw that, sure enough, no one in this country had gotten wild polio since 1979.

This was not the last death from polio. This was the last time an American had contracted wild polio. (There was one case of vaccine-derived polio in 2022, caused by someone who received the oral polio vaccine in another country and brought it back to the United States.)

Between 1979 and 2009, around 100 million babies had been born in the United States. And none of them had gotten polio.

If you look on the CDC’s website, it tells you very plainly that the disease has been eliminated in the United States:

Polio was declared to be eradicated in the entire Western Hemisphere in 1994. Here’s a Reuters story on this announcement that ran in the New York Times on Oct. 2, 1994.

Since 1994, no child in any country in Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States or Canada has gotten polio.

Remarkable.

Jennifer Margulis was right. There was no chance that an American child born in 2009 or 2010 could get polio. It just wasn’t possible. There was therefore no reason for any American child to get the polio vaccine.

[I found out later there is actually no polio anywhere in the world except for cases of polio that had been caused by the polio vaccine. That’s right…the only cases of polio in the entire world are those CAUSED by a polio vaccine.]

So there I was, trying to figure out the answer to the question: Why was the polio vaccine on the CDC schedule of recommended childhood vaccinations? Why did our federal public health authorities want American children to be vaccinated with the polio vaccine?

There was no health benefit, because there was no polio. The thing the vaccine offered protection from no longer existed.

What was the reason? It wasn’t health. It was something else, and I knew that I could not trust the CDC’s vaccine schedule and that it would be up to me to determine which vaccines, if any, my child might truly need.

What I found was that all of them, as far as I could see, were so rare that an American child was very, very unlikely to get them (e.g. Tetanus) or else — as in the case of measles and chicken pox — not something very serious at all and not something likely to seriously harm my child.

I was actually quite surprised to see that there was a chicken pox vaccine on the schedule. What was it doing there? I remembered getting chicken pox when I was a kid. It was itchy red spots and in a few days it was gone. This was the same experience my brothers and my friends all had. I don’t remember reports of any child dying or even being hospitalized with chicken pox. Why would babies and small children be given an injection to protect against it?

As for measles, it had been years since an American had died from measles, and the panicked reporting about measles outbreaks around the country always seemed a bit overdone to me. Measles didn’t cripple anyone. Most children seemed to get through it without much of a problem.

But it was the polio vaccine that really seemed to be the most striking example.

It should not have been on the schedule. Yet there it was.

The polio vaccine now being given to American children is not the Salk vaccine or the Sabin vaccine that followed it. It’s an IPV vaccine — Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine — made by the huge French vaccine company Sanofi Pasteur.

It goes by the tradename ‘IPOL.’

The CDC recommends that this vaccine be given to babies at two months, four months, 6-18 months and at 4-6 years of age.

That’s four doses of the vaccine before the age of 7.

There are some interesting things to know about the vaccine. One is that it doesn’t prevent infection. Another is that it doesn’t stop the spread of the virus.

In these respects, it’s like the Covid vaccine. It doesn’t prevent a person from getting the virus — in this case poliomyelitis. Rather, it lessens the symptoms and is meant to protect against severe paralysis. And if someone has the virus, they can still give polio to someone else even if they’ve been vaccinated.

And as was the case with the Covid vaccine, you will never, ever hear any mention of this on the news — that the polio vaccine does not stop a child from contracting polio and does not stop a child from giving it to other children. They would not want you to know this.

Interestingly, AI knows this, if you know to ask:

As you can see from the highlighted text above, polio doesn’t spread through the air. Rather, the fecal matter (poop) from an infected child has to come into contact with the mouth of another child.

I say child because polio usually afflicted children age 5 and under and there is some dispute about what actually caused it, with the book “The Moth in the Iron Lung” positing that polio was actually caused by the use of pesticides, including DDT, meant to exterminate the gypsy moth.

Another interesting thing about the polio vaccine is that it is grown in a monkey kidney cell and therefor contains the DNA of a monkey.

No, this is not a conspiracy. Here’s the first paragraph from the package insert for the vaccine, which can be found on the FDA’s website:

Here’s a link to the full package insert: https://www.fda.gov/media/75695/download?attachment

I never investigated the safety of the polio vaccine because once I determined that there was absolutely no benefit to getting the shot, it didn’t matter how safe it was. We weren’t going to get it.

But the issue of safety of the polio vaccine has now been laid upon the table as the New York Times last month used the polio vaccine to attack Robert F. Kennedy, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

In a Dec. 13 article, the writer, longtime New York Times health reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, implied that Kennedy himself wants to get rid of the polio vaccine, though the story is really about attorney Aaron Siri and his 2022 petition to the FDA on behalf of ICAN, the Informed Consent Action Network, to withdraw or suspend the polio vaccine.

Why take the polio vaccine off the market?

Because there were no safety studies done using a control group that is given a placebo, meaning that it’s impossible to know if a child given the vaccine has a better outcome than a child who doesn’t get the vaccine.

And also because in the safety study for IPOL, the participants were only followed for three days — something Stolberg strangely left out of her story.

An earnest and honest health reporter would have independently confirmed what Siri alleged in the petition and then written a huge article on the lack of any real safety study demonstrating that IPOL is safe for use in infants and children.

What a story, what a bombshell story it would be if the New York Times exposed that a vaccine that has been injected into the veins of babies and children in America for 24 years (since 2000) was never really safety tested.

But that wasn’t a story that Stolberg wanted to write or the Times wanted to publish.

The best data on the safety of the polio vaccine is from VAERS, from reports from healthcare providers and from families, telling of side effects experienced by young children after they’ve gotten the vaccine.

Here’s the first one I happened to click on, below, when looking in VAERS this week. A four-month-old baby boy was taken to the doctor to get his regular vaccines, including IPOL, and was rushed to the hospital in critical condition after breaking out in hives, going into shock and struggling to breathe. This is one of 1,577 cases in VAERS of an American child being hospitalized after getting the Sanofi polio vaccine (IPOL).

Patient Age: 0.40

Sex: Male

State: California

Date Report Completed: 2009-04-08

Date Vaccinated: 2009-04-02

Date Report Received: 2009-04-08

Date of Onset: 2009-04-02

Serious? Yes

* VAERS 2.0 Report Form Only
** VAERS-1 Report Form Only
"Not Applicable" will appear when information is not available on this report form version.

Life Threatening?

Hospitalized? Yes

Days in Hospital: 3

Vaccine Type: DIPHTHERIA AND TETANUS TOXOIDS AND ACELLULAR PERTUSSIS VACCINE; HAEMOPHILUS B CONJUGATE VACCINE; PNEUMOCOCCAL, 7-VALENT VACCINE (PREVNAR); POLIOVIRUS VACCINE INACTIVATED

Adverse Event Description:

Within 10 minutes of receiving the vaccines, patient developed hives on his head and then experienced shortness of breath, wheezing and his lips turned blue. He went limp, losing consciousness. He went into anaphylactic shock, required an epi pen, oxygen, Benadryl and then was taken in critical condition by ambulance to hospital. He was treated in the emergency room, had an IV placed in his head, several breathing treatments, more drugs and was then admitted to the hospital for three days. 4/20/09-records received for DOS 4/2-4/4/09-DC DX: Anaphylaxis. Allergic reaction. Ten minutes after receiving vaccines, developed hives on head and had trouble breathing turned blue and cyanotic around mouth and dusky all over, eyes rolled back and went limp and passed out. PE: wheezing, shortness of breath and labored breathing, rash erythema all over, cyanotic episode and hypertonia. Scratching all over.

You can see the actual report in VAERS here: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D8/D419F995

The polio vaccine should absolutely be taken off the CDC vaccine schedule and its license should be revoked. Our government can’t recommend that something be injected into the bloodstream of babies and toddlers that has not been tested for safety, for all practical purposes. This is a crime against humanity. And so is the media’s refusal to report accurately on this.

Polio is gone. Like smallpox.

It’s time to ditch the vaccine. In fact, it should be the first one to come off of the CDC’s schedule in the new administration.