A conversation with Dr.

Thomas Cowan:
How Vaccinations Cause Chronic Immune
Dysregulation
August 21, 2013

Here’s the story on vaccines; I’m going to give you tons of everything you need to know about
vaccines in hopefully 5 minutes or less.

Number one: We humans have at least two immune systems. One is called the cell-mediated
response and the other is called humoral response or cell-mediated immunity and humoral
immunity. Cell-mediated means that we have the system of white blood cells that if you get a
new invader, like a new virus, and because we’ve never encountered this before, the virus will
infect, meaning get inside different cells – like a viral respiratory tract. So you have infected cells
which the white blood cells have to go after them, shoot them up and spit them out and in the
process you get what we call being sick. Being sick means fever, flu-like symptoms, cough, runny
nose, mucus, etcetera. And the important point to remember, and this is a really important point,
is that what we call being sick – fever, flu, mucus, cough, rash, etcetera, that’s because of our cell-
mediated immune system. I can’t emphasize that enough. The reason why I know that is because
if you suppress somebody’s cell-mediated immune system like with Prednisone and then you
infect them with a virus, they don’t get “sick” like fever, rash, cough, and etcetera. They might
even die from the infection, which is not likely, but they could, but they won’t get what we
normally call being sick. On the other hand, if you give somebody the chemicals of their cell-
mediated system, which we know some of them now, so you can stimulate a cell-mediated
immune response without any infection at all – no virus, no bacteria, no nothing, just stimulate
their cell-mediated immune system and they get sick; they have a cough and fever and rash and
mucus and all the rest. So that which we call being sick is a cell-mediated response. It’s triggered
by a virus or a bacteria or other things, but it’s not because of them. We make ourselves sick.

Number two: After you get the cell-mediated immune system clear, the virus and then your
humoral, otherwise known as antibody system, remembers what happened. So next time you
make antibodies. And that takes about 4 to 6 weeks. Then if you ever get that same virus again,
you tag the components of that virus before it infects the cells. You clear it before it infects the
cells. The cell-mediated immune system never needs to get involved and the person doesn’t get
sick. And in fact every naturally occurring infection, for instance chickenpox, has both of those
arms of the immune system involved. So you get infected with the virus then you make a cell-
mediated reaction, then you’re sick for two weeks, then you make antibodies so that if you ever
get that virus again, you will tag it before it infects your cells and you’ll never get sick again,
generally speaking. So that’s how the immune system works – there’s always both those aspects,
always.

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There has never been until about the 1940’s a situation where you have the stimulation of one
without the other. So that’s what happens with vaccines, the whole point of a vaccine is to
stimulate the humoral immunity, the humoral antibodies without a prior cell-mediated response.
Again, I can’t emphasize that enough if you want to understand what’s happening. This has never
happened, as far as we know; this is unprecedented. So instead if you get the chickenpox virus,
the whole point is to stimulate antibodies because if they stimulated a cell-mediated response,
then the parents would say, “Hey you just make my child sick, I’m not doing this anymore.” So by
definition, a vaccination program is the attempt to stimulate the antibodies without a cell-
mediated response. The other thing about this is in order to do that, because the body doesn’t
like to do that, you have to put irritants into the viral products to make the antibody system react.
This is also crucial because if you just put in attenuated chickenpox virus proteins, the immune
system wouldn’t react. So you have to put counter irritants such as aluminum and formaldehyde
and mercury and something to irritate the immune system into reacting. There’s no way around
that.

Question: That’s interesting because I thought they were just used as preservatives.

Dr. Thomas Cowan: Their use is as an adjuvant. Adjuvant means something that’s necessary
for the body to recognize and make a reaction. So what about the people who call for companies
to make better, safer vaccines? Number one, the whole vaccine – its thing is to stimulate
antibodies. Number two, because it’s not the usual way the body recognizes it, you’re going to
have to do something irritating to make it happen. There’s no way around it. When they call for
better and safer vaccines, the vaccine people just laugh. They know that people don’t understand
what this is about.

So then, the theory of this – and this goes back to people in the 40’s thing – that if you do this
repeatedly to people, you will stimulate a situation of suppressed cell-mediated immunity and
heightened antibody responses. Why? Because that’s the goal. So if you make a list of the
diseases that are characterized by suppressed cell-mediated immunity and heightened humoral
immunity, you’re talking things like asthma, allergies, eczema and autoimmune diseases including
Crohn’s, colitis, MS [multiple sclerosis], Sjogren’s syndrome, Hashimoto’s, etcetera. All of these
are characterized by increased antibody production – that is what we mean by an autoimmune
disease.

So the question is how did we go from, and I often tell people to ask your grandparents or parents
– how many children did they know in the 1940 or ’50’s who had food allergies, eczema and
allergies, and the answer is basically none, ‘cause I remember when I was in grade school there
was one guy with asthma and we made fun of him because he was sick, which probably wasn’t
very nice, but it was so unusual like, how could you be sick? Now, it’s anywhere from 20 to 40% of
the children have some sort of chronic disease. So how did we get there? Well, all these chronic
diseases are characterized by excessive antibody production. So how did we get that? Well, that
was the point of the vaccination program. I mean that’s the goal. So how would you expect or
why would you expect anything else to happen? Now people would say to me, “Well this has

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 never been proven.” But interestingly there’s a study out of Kobe University in Japan where they
took I think rats, maybe mice and they put them on the standard American vaccination program
and they wanted to see if they could develop antibodies not unlike autoimmune disease. And
they found that at a certain threshold they could consistently and reliably get animals to create an
autoimmune disease by simply vaccinating. So this has been done in animals, so then the
question is, but it’s never been done in humans, but actually it has and that’s called the last 70
years. We did that.

There’s a reason, the biggest subset of diseases or rather the fastest growing subset of diseases
are autoimmune diseases. It’s because we’re producing them. It’s a growth industry. So if people
want to invest in something, they should invest in the growth of autoimmune. By the way, it’s also
interesting that while vaccines have driven such a growth in the number of diseases which we can
now vaccinate, particularly in the last 10 years, it’s been an explosion and there’s proposed to be
at least 10 or 30 more diseases which we can vaccinate against. And you know part of the reason
for that is the part of the US Patriot Act which I won’t say much more about, but the part that I’m
concerned about is called the Vaccine Compensation Board where two things; people will
probably remember that part of that whole 9/11 business was the Anthrax scare. As a result of
the Anthrax, part of the Patriot Act made it so that companies that develop the vaccine, because
they will say all of the companies aren’t developing new vaccines like Anthrax and then we’re all
going to be dead from Anthrax (even though that turned out to be from a US government lab), so
part of Patriot Act was exempting vaccine manufacturers from any damages in perpetuity,
meaning forever from injury caused by vaccines.

So if you’re Merck Pharmaceuticals and you make a vaccine and you kill a thousand people, you
cannot be held liable for the damage. Instead the government set up a National Vaccine
Compensation Board so that in return for your silence, because in order for you to get money to
be compensated, you have to waive your right to disclose what happened forevermore. So if you
do that, they will pay you a certain amount of money which they apparently, it’s not easy to
notice, but they pay billions. So it’s a great business model for the development of new vaccines
because the rest of the drugs, if they make Vioxx and people have heart attacks, they get sued
and that’s not good for business – so they don’t want it.

Question: And so, do you generally recommend against all vaccines, or do you think there are
some that are OK?

Dr. Thomas Cowan: So here’s what I’ll say over and over again. There’s basically three issues:

1. One, is do they work and there’s… I can’t remember the website but I have it on my iPad. There’s
actually a study from a JAMA journal, the AMA study in 1999 looking at the incidents of vaccines –
actually the death rate from infectious disease since 1940 and what’s clear is that the death rate
was going way down before vaccines were introduced. So there’s a huge question of whether
they work.

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2. The second one is what about these excipients, these adjuvants; mercury, formaldehyde,
aluminum, etcetera. All those are neurotoxins.

3. And the third one which is the one that I am mostly concerned about is the changing of your
immune system. So what I tell people is, given those questions I can’t tell you whether or not to
get a vaccine, but I can tell you the way to look at it is you have to think about the potential
benefit … also knowing that whenever there’s an outbreak or an epidemic of whatever it is;
whooping cough or measles etcetera, at least half of the people who gets the disease were
already vaccinated.

So number one, you have to think of the potential – of any efficacy of the vaccine versus the
known risk of injecting your child with a known neurotoxin and an immune-shifting drug. And
there’s not a question about whether that’s going to happen – it does happen. And it doesn’t
necessarily rise to the level of other diseases, but you cannot repeatedly vaccinate somebody and
not expect a change in their immune system. So given that, you just have to decide which makes
more sense to you. I mean I think it’s a rational decision for somebody to say, “Yes I know that
giving my child a chickenpox vaccine will shift them more towards allergies, autoimmune disease,
even cancer – those forms of disease. I know it will create some neurotoxicity, but I’m not willing
to live with the chance of them getting chickenpox.” Fine. What I don’t like is, “Get the vaccine,
they work great, there’s no downside.” I mean that’s a fairytale. So as long as people have good
information I think they can make their own decision.

Question: Yeah ‘cause some people – they just have a certain risk tolerance. I have a friend that
she said just could not live with herself if her child got one of these so-called preventable diseases
like measles or mumps or rubella or whatnot. But in my case, there doesn’t seem to be that many
outbreaks of these diseases. I mean you see some whooping cough and you see some measles
here and there.

Dr. Thomas Cowan: I’ve never seen any measles, so I don’t know what you think. I have not
seen one case of measles in 30 years of doing medicine.

Question: That’s good. So I mean for me personally, I don’t want my child vaccinated because I
know so many people with autoimmune diseases at such young ages that for me the risk of
chronic immune dysregulation and autoimmune diseases and cancer – we have a 50% cancer rate
almost – is a much, much higher risk.

Dr. Thomas Cowan: Right. And you know the ultimate irony is that people who go on about
heard immunity. They vaccinate children their children so they’re supposedly fine and then they
say, “Well, you’re putting my child at risk.” Why? Because they’re vaccinated!

Then they sometimes say, “Well someday if everybody has it and then we wipe out the disease,
then we won’t need to vaccinate.” First of all if there’s no risk for vaccines, what difference does
that make? And second of all that will never happened except maybe in small part and no other

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vaccine. Even if there’s 20 years of no polio in the Western world, there’s not even any suggestion
that they should stop vaccinating. It’s not going to happen. So if they’re so confident in these
vaccines and they give them to the children and they have no consequences, no downside, what
difference does it make? They should be fine.

About the Author

Dr. Thomas Cowan is on the board of directors of the much respected Weston A.
Price Foundation and contributor to their quarterly magazine.
Dr. Cowan has served as vice president of the Physicians Association for
Anthroposophical Medicine and is a founding board member of the Weston A.
Price Foundation. He is the principal author of the book, The Fourfold Path to
Healing, which was published in 2004 by New Trends Publishing. He writes the
“Ask the Doctor” column in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming
and the Healing Arts, the Foundation’s™ quarterly magazine,
and has lectured throughout the United States and Canada.

To read about how he approaches specific health challenges, see the articles page of his website. It
contains both a compendium of articles published in the Weston A. Price Foundation journal
“Wise Traditions” as well as articles on such topics as heart disease, cancer and gastrointestinal
diseases.

He has three grown children and currently practices medicine in San Francisco where he resides with his wife, Lynda
Smith Cowan. Dr. Cowan sees patients at his office in San Francisco, does long-distance consults by telephone, and
is accepting new patients.

Books by Dr. Thomas Cowan

The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care makes the principles of
traditional nutrition available to modern parents. The book provides holistic
advice for pregnancy and newborn interventions, vaccinations, breastfeeding and
child development, as well as a compendium of natural treatments for childhood
illnesses, from autism to whooping cough.
The Fourfold Path to Healing merges the wisdom of traditional societies, the
most modern findings of western medicine and the esoteric teaching of the
ancients. The fourfold approach includes: Nutrition using nutrient-dense
traditional foods; therapeutics through a wide range of nontoxic remedies; Movement to heal and strengthen the
emotions; and medication to develop your powers of objective thought.

Find Dr. Cowan: Visit his website at: FourFoldHealing.com

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration. Nothing that was said is
intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.