Vaccines are a very lucrative business. Pfizer’s vaccine Prevnar, which targets 13 strains of pneumococcus bacteria, generated $6.25 billion in revenue last year. And that’s just one vaccine.¹

Even ineffective vaccines allow vaccine makers to make a mint. One of the most obvious vaccine failures is the mumps vaccine (part of the measles, mumps, rubella, aka MMR).

Again and again, outbreaks among vaccinated populations occur, yet rarely is the truth of the situation addressed, namely the fact that the vaccine is ineffective and doesn’t work as advertised.

In 2010, two virologists filed a federal lawsuit against Merck, their former employer, alleging the vaccine maker engaged in improper testing and data falsification to artificially inflate the efficacy rating of their mumps vaccine.

For details on how they allegedly pulled this off, read Dr. Suzanne Humphries’ excellent summary,² which explains in layman’s terms how the tests were manipulated.

Just about every media outlet reported the lawsuit, and the hundreds of millions of dollars Merck was said to have defrauded from the U.S. government by selling a vaccine of questionable effectiveness.

As reported by Reuters³ last year, Merck’s behavior in and of itself suggests they’re trying to cover up fraud:

“Attorneys at Constantine Cannon, who represent the scientists, asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Lynne Sitarski of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to compel Merck to respond to their discovery request, which asks the company to give the efficacy of the vaccine as a percentage.

Instead of answering the question, the letter said, Merck has been consistently evasive, using ‘cut-and-paste’ answers saying it cannot run a new clinical trial to determine the current efficacy, and providing only data from 50 years ago.

‘Merck should not be permitted to raise as one of its principal defenses that its vaccine has a high efficacy, which is accurately represented on the product’s label, but then refuse to answer what it claims that efficacy actually is,’ the letter said.”

So why are people still surprised when mumps outbreaks occur? And why are the unvaccinated still blamed for most disease outbreaks, even when most of the infected are vaccinated?

Vaccinated People Are Spreading the Mumps

Recently, 41 students at Harvard University came down with mumps and, according to the Public Health department in Cambridge, every single one of those students had been vaccinated.⁴

Four other campuses in Boston are also starting to see cases, as have four universities in Indiana. About 13 cases of mumps have also cropped up in California.

One ridiculous explanation offered by Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security, is that the vaccine only works if the exposure to the virus is low; it can’t be expected to work if there are high amounts of exposure, such as in dorms:⁵

“The exposure that they have to mumps is so high in these situations that it overcomes the ability of the vaccine to protect them,” Adalja told Live Science. “It may be that, in these special situations, a much higher level of antibodies [against mumps] is needed to keep the virus at bay.”

In 2009, more than 1,000 people in New Jersey and New York contracted the disease. At the time, questions arose about the effectiveness of the vaccine because 77 percent of those sickened were vaccinated.

A similar scenario occurred in 2006, when mumps infected more than 6,500 people in the U.S. Most of those cases also occurred among the vaccinated population, primarily among college students who had received two doses of MMR vaccine.

Now, if a vaccine is indeed highly effective, and avoiding the disease in question is worth the risk of the potential side effects from the vaccine, then many people would conclude that the vaccine’s benefits outweigh the risks.

However, if the vaccine is ineffective, and/or if the disease doesn’t pose a great threat to begin with, then the vaccine may indeed pose an unacceptable risk. This is particularly true if the vaccine has been linked to serious side effects.

Unfortunately, that’s the case with the MMR vaccine, which has been linked to at least 98 deaths and 694 disabilities between 2003 and 2015. Considering the fact that only 1 to 10 percent of vaccine reactions are ever reported, those numbers could actually be closer to 980 deaths and 6,940 disabilities.

Meanwhile, death from mumps is “exceedingly rare” according to the CDC,⁶ and no one has died from mumps during any of the recent outbreaks.

The Myth of Vaccine-Generated Herd Immunity

Vaccine promoters typically stress the importance of compliance with the federally recommended vaccine schedule in order to create and maintain vaccine-induced “herd immunity.” This may require multiple doses of certain vaccines, the MMR included, because no vaccine is 100 percent effective.

However, they never quite seem to be able to explain why the majority of outbreaks occur in areas that are thought to HAVE herd immunity status, i.e. where the majority of people are fully vaccinated and “should” therefore not be able to be infected or transmit infection.

The problem stems from a mix-up of terms. While there is such a thing as natural herd immunity, vaccine-induced herd immunity is a total misnomer. Vaccine makers simply assumed that vaccines will work in the same way as natural immunity, but the science clearly shows that this is not the case.

Vaccination and exposure to a given disease produce two qualitatively different types of immune responses. To learn more, I urge you to listen to the video above, in which Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), discusses the concept of herd immunity. As explained by Barbara:

“Vaccines do not confer the same type of immunity that natural exposure to the disease does … [V]accines only confer temporary protection … In most cases natural exposure to disease would give you a longer lasting, more robust, qualitatively superior immunity because it gives you both cell mediated immunity and humoral immunity.

Humoral is the antibody production. The way you measure vaccine-induced immunity is by how high the antibody titers are. (How many antibodies you have.) The problem is, the cell mediated immunity is very important as well. Most vaccines evade cell mediated immunity and go straight for the antibodies, which is only one part of immunity.”

Ineffective Vaccines May Pose an Unacceptable Health Risk

In essence, vaccines are designed to trick your body’s immune system into producing the antibodies needed to resist any future infection. However, your body is smarter than that.

The artificial stimulation of your immune system produced by lab-altered killed bacteria or an attenuated live virus is not the same as your body experiencing a natural viral or bacterial infection, which may or may not make you clinically ill but will confer a longer lasting immunity compared to vaccine acquired artificial immunity that is qualitatively inferior and far more temporary.

So the question is, is it well-advised to protect children against a large number of infectious diseases early in life through temporary artificial immunity from vaccines, or might they be better off contracting certain contagious infections in childhood, thereby attaining longer lasting natural immunity that may even last them for the rest of their lives?

And, do vaccine complications ultimately cause more chronic illness and death than infectious diseases do? In the case of the MMR vaccine, this question seems particularly pertinent. While there are 98 reports of death following vaccination between 2003 and 2015, only one child has died from acute measles complications in the decade between 2005 and 2015.⁷