History of Injury Day 4, The 1942 Hepatitis Epidemic

9:33 AM Tiffany 0 Comments








More often than not vaccines are credited with preventing or countering huge deadly epidemics, saving millions of lives. The stories that we don't frequently hear are the ones where the vaccine was the cause of the epidemic.


People talk about the great hepatitis b and c outbreak of the 1940's. It was huge in scale, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly military personal infected with hepatitis b and c. Where did this epidemic stem from though, what was the root cause? Most people would be surprised (or maybe my readers wont be at all) that this epidemic was the direct result of the military testing of a yellow fever vaccine.  Army veterans given yellow fever vaccine contaminated with hepatitis B virus in 1942. 69,988 men were the subjects of the cohort study. Another epidemic of icteric hepatitis in 1942 affected approximately 50,000 Army personnel. The Spanish Influenza of 1918 killed 20 to 40 million people right after World War I. Incidentally, this war was the first war in which vaccines were mandatory for the military. Eleanora I. McBean M.D. gives a detailed account of what occurred during that time. She stated in her book entitled "Swine Flu Expose," that the vaccine developed to fight against the disease was, in fact, the cause of all of these deaths and not the supposed pandemic.


Dr. McBean said that after the War:
"I heard that seven men dropped dead in a doctor’s office after being vaccinated. This was in an army camp, so I wrote to the Government for verification. They sent me the report of U.S. Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson.1..."
"This report not only verified the report of the seven who dropped dead from the vaccines, but it stated that there had been 63 deaths and 28,585 cases of hepatitis as a direct result of the yellow fever vaccine during only 6 months of the war. That was only one of the 14 to 25 shots given the soldiers." In later years, similar experiments were done: "The military disclosed evidence that it had released disease-causing germs in at least 48 open-air tests."
"In 1994, Senator John D. Rockefeller’s report (Examining Biological Experimentation on U.S. Military) further revealed that over the previous fifty years, the U.S. military intentionally exposed hundreds of thousands of their own soldiers to dangerous microbes, mustard and nerve gas, radiation, hallucinogens, and psycho-chemicals."

This outbreak was linked to specific lots of yellow-fever vaccine stabilized with human serum. Mortality of Korean War Veterans infected with Hepatitis C Virus. Approximately 100 veterans had been identified as Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) infected by testing the serum specimens collected from approximately 9,500 military recruits during the period 1949 to 1954. 

Injury

At least 100 deaths
At least 100,000 people effected with Hepatitis B or C
True amount of injury is unknown

Court Cases
NA

Articles
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/2000/10/cohen2.htm

http://www.hmsreview.org/?article=historical-path-of-discovery-of-viral-hepatitis

http://www.michaeljournal.org/H1N1.htm

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