The CDC’s webpages http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/index.html tout a large number of studies of the short term effects of vaccination, events say within 72 hours of receipt.

However, they don’t cite any studies on the long term effects of vaccines. Can vaccines damage development in infants? Do they stunt your growth or make you fat? Do they make you stupid? Do they damage the immune system? How long does vaccine protection last? Does its nature change qualitatively over time in ways that might create danger? For example, after a period of years, may your immunity wane to the point where you can become a carrier of diseases for which you were vaccinated? They don’t report data on these subjects.

The CDC says http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Vaccines/multiplevaccines.html
“No evidence suggests that the recommended childhood vaccines can “overload” the immune system.”
(Emphasis added.) This is a blatant lie (eg: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008382 and much much more below and elsewhere), but also it begs the question:
why don’t they report empirical studies on the subject rather than asserting ignorance? Aren’t they in charge of studying such issues?

There is a scientific literature on these matters. Virtually every study of which I’m aware, that studies the long term effects of vaccination on the development of children’s or infant animals’ immune systems or brains, finds that vaccines are highly damaging to development.

This includes studies injecting infant animals with the aluminum in the vaccine series or with antigens, which unanimously report the animals develop abnormally, including brain damage and auto-immune disease. Examples are http://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/27/6904.full and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21643765 and http://lup.sagepub.com/content/21/2/195.abstract and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0162013413001773.

The literature also includes randomized placebo test of a flu vaccine in children, followed by following their health for a sustained period. The vaccinees got 4 times as many respiratory illnesses as the recipients of placebo.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22423139
Other studies, both human and animal, report that flu vaccines can damage the immune system
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21880755
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20335492
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19440239

The literature also includes epidemiological studies, that compare kids who got more and earlier vaccines to those getting fewer and less. For example, nations with fewer vaccines in the series have much less infant mortality http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170075/.
States with lower vaccine compliance have much less autism. etc. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21623535 There are many more.

The study the CDC touts http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/Autism/antigens.html as evaluating parents’ concerns of “too many vaccines too soon” and autism is
(a) written by a lead author who also was lead author on another study which his own collaborator says was improperly manipulated to hide a vaccine-autism connection http://www.morganverkamp.com/august-27-2014-press-release-statement-of-william-w-thompson-ph-d-regarding-the-2004-article-examining-the-possibility-of-a-relationship-between-mmr-vaccine-and-autism/. Do they really need to rely on him as their sole source for arguing vaccines don’t cause autism?
(b) compares patients by the number of “antigens” they receive, rather than the number or earliness of vaccines. Table 1 in De Stefano et al 2013 http://jpeds.com/webfiles/images/journals/ympd/JPEDSDeStefano.pdf defines what is meant by this. DTP has 3002 antigens while no other common vaccine in their data set had more than a handful. That means that patients who got DTP and other vaccines had more than 3000 antigens and were the high antigen group, compared to patients who may well have gotten equally many or earlier or more vaccines, but didn’t get DTP. (Many of them got DTaP instead.) This study compared two groups of patients that seem likely to have gotten roughly the same number of vaccines, and the same earliness, and the same aluminum. It doesn’t seem they would have found a different result, for example, if the aluminum in vaccines were the sole cause of autism.

The CDC also don’t tout any papers on how long vaccine protection lasts. In fact peer reviewed articles (see previous blog post) indicate that a few years after last booster, immunity may be waning for most people to the point where they can become carriers of the disease. So the vaunted “Herd Immunity” seems more, according to the published science, like “Herd Weakening and Contagion”. As far as you might gather from the CDC’s site, vaccine immunity is eternal and unpiercable.

If the CDC were seriously interested in regulating the manufacturers, (and they should be since Congress has indemnified the manufacturers, so if the CDC doesn’t regulate them, who will), after seeing a placebo controlled study showing that a flu vaccine destroyed the immune systems of the kids who received it http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22423139 they would surely at a minimum demand such a study for every vaccine. For flu shots the results would of course come too late every year, but at least they might get some confidence over time. And they might compensate the recipients of vaccines that placebo controlled studies showed had gotten damaged immune systems. Heck, the manufacturers could offer a guarantee: we’re doing a double blind randomized test on the side. If you get our vaccine, and the placebo test shows it destroys your immune system after all like the last placebo test did, we’ll refund your money, and buy you an ice cream for the inconvenience.

According to Richard P. Feynman, it is incumbent on a scientist to emphasize everything that could be wrong with his theory, not sweep it under the rug. When this is widely disregarded, cargo cult science results.

I genuinely don’t want to do Cargo Cult Science so if anybody reading this knows of any citations to studies looking at the long term effects of vaccines and finding them benign or beneficial, please, be sure to post them in the comments.

Chen et al, Measles antibody: reevaluation of protective titers http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2230231
reported on data from a measles outbreak that came just after a school blood drive. So they had before and after titer information on the students. They observed that 7 out of 8 donors with titers below 120 got clinical measles, compared with none having titer above 120. So a titer of 120 appears to protect against getting clinical measles. However, 70% of donors with titers between 120 and 1050 reported symptoms without getting the rash, as did 30% of donors with titers above 1050, and about 70% of patients in the 120-1050 group
also had their titers go up by a factor of more than 4, indicating that they had had a measles virus infection, even though short of clinical measles.

So the conclusion: below 120, vulnerable to measles. Above 120, won’t get clinical measles, but may get ill without rash and become contagious for measles. Below 1050, 70% chance of getting ill and becoming contagious for measles. Above 1050, less than 30%.

Le Baron et al, Persistence of measles antibodies after 2 doses of measles vaccine in a postelimination environment
http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=569784
studied how long titers persist in kids after their last booster. The results are plain in their Figure 3. They report that around 95% of recipients of the MMR have a titer over the 120 that Chen et al predict should prevent one from getting clinical measles for at least 10 years. (After that the percentage vulnerable starts rising rapidly.) That’s the good news.

The bad news is, they report that 2 years after their last booster, more than a third of kids will have titers below 1050, the region where, according to Chen et al, such kids will have a 70% chance of becoming ill and contagious if exposed, although they won’t show the rash. And 30% of kids with titers not far above that, and there are many of those, may also become ill and contagious. As each year passes from the MMR, still more kids fall into the camp vulnerable to illness and contagion, although not yet clinical measles. In a fully vaccinated population, even if most people are protected from clinical measles, most will be subject to infection by and transmission of measles virus.

This is why, I expect, you see constant epidemics in near 100% vaccinated populations, and herd immunity is a marketing slogan of the vaccine industry. For example, New York State boasts a 97% compliance rate for MMR in kindergarten http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6133a2.htm .
Yet they have measles outbreaks every year or two, including a measles outbreak starting with a fully vaccinated index case http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/04/measles-outbreak-traced-fully-vaccinated-patient-first-time
and a measles outbreak with 90% of the patients vaccinated http://www.thedailysheeple.com/new-york-measles-outbreak-90-vaccinated_032014.

In fact, it seems very likely that the pool of vaccinated carriers may well be keeping measles from being eradicated. As we saw in the NY case (although she apparently had a rash), a vaccinated carrier may not recognize they have measles or may not be quarantined, preventing the disease from being eradicated. Measles may travel from vaccinee to vaccinee, not getting the characteristic rash or being recognized, until finally it lights into an unvaccinated individual or one whose titer has faded below 120, and is declared measles.
If we persist in vaccinating, the disease may never go away, whereas it might well be that if we simply stopped vaccinating, the disease would vanish from the means that have likely eradicated most of the other diseases that have gone away: quarantine and better nutrition.

Update: There’s other evidence on this. Maybe I’ll post on it later. For example, vaccinated baboons (but not naturally immune baboons) when exposed to pertussis carried the virus and could spread it for 35 days. Seemingly, as titers fade, the problems of original antigenic sin may mean the carriers take very long times to clear the virus if exposed.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baboon-study-reveals-new-shortcoming-of-pertussis-vaccine/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

For which diseases do we see more continuing outbreaks:
Typhoid, Scarlet Fever, Bubonic Plague, Scurvy — all once major killers, hardly anybody in the population vaccinated against any of them, or
Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pox, Whooping Cough– nearly 100% vaccinated population, potentially providing a population of virus carriers.

Note added, found a more recent paper that confirms Le Baron on a larger group. According to this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21539880
only 23% of people have a PRMN titer of over 1050, 7.4 years after their last MMR booster

Note added: New paper indicates pertussis is spreading through asymptomatic transmission of vaxed individuals.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/146