The Smallpox Vaccine Body Count

The Centers for Disease Control has just issued two new reports indicating that at least four people died from smallpox vaccinations between 2002 and 2004. The two studies appeared in the current Journal of the American Medical Association. One looked at military and government personnel who received the smallpox vaccine and the other of first responders in local communities. Put the two studies together and it looks as if at least as many people died from preparations for the next bioterror attack as died from the Fall 2001 anthrax letters.

The report on military and government employees is especially troubling, because it suggests that something is askew in the military’s adverse events reporting system. The CDC researchers looked at post-inoculation adverse events reports among the 590,400 military and 64,600 Health and Human Service personnel who received the smallpox inoculation. They found just 214 reported events. More than half were among the smaller cohort of HHS workers! The only way that 10 percent of the inoculated subjects can generate over 50 percent of the reports is if the military told its enlistees to suck it up and quit complaining when something felt wrong after their shot.

Most of the reported adverse events were mild: headaches, dizziness and brief, local paralysis at the site of the injection. However, there were 39 serious events, ranging from meningitis to seizures. These 655,000 vaccinees suffered just one death.

On the other hand, the CDC statisticians who reviewed adverse events among the 37,901 volunteers in 55 communities who took the smallpox vaccine reported three deaths. In addition, this much smaller group reported 822 adverse events – over one in every 50 shots – with 100 of them considered “serious.”

The CDC has often been criticized for being overly enthusiastic about the public health benefits from mass vaccination campaigns. So it isn't surprising that the authors of both studies called the incidence of adverse events "rare."

Someone on Capitol Hill should take a look at these reports. There clearly seems to be a problem with underreporting in the military. Moreover, three deaths among fewer than 40,000 non-federal volunteers who got the vaccine cannot accurately be called rare. If 200 million Americans got the vaccine and died at a similar rate, it would translate into 15,000 deaths.

That’s simply unacceptable, especially when there is no evidence that anyone is preparing to use smallpox as a bioterror weapon.