by Michael Belkin 
My business involves advising portfolio managers about asset allocation in global financial markets. During my career, I have observed several extreme speculative bubbles, including the Japanese stock market in the late 1980s, the NASDAQ frenzy in 1998–2000 and the U.S. housing bubble from 2006–2008.
These bubbles all ended in tears. I see the same elements now in the pharmaceutical industry’s preoccupation with vaccines. I coined the term “vaccine bubble” (in the book Vaccine Epidemic) to describe the economic and psychological factors that are driving the obsession with and over-investment in vaccines. The psychology of making big profits is causing a lemming-like rush into vaccine research and production. Ultimately, many of these companies and vaccine products will likely turn out to be flash-in-the-pan nobodies and nothings that simply waste investment and get discarded on the ash heap of medical history. In the meantime, families and individuals need to educate themselves and make informed decisions about vaccine acceptance or refusal.
The business model of vaccine manufacturers relies on compulsion—you must take their product, or else.
Investing in Health
Taking pharmaceutical company advice about vaccine safety and efficacy is like trusting a stockbroker or real estate agent to tell you the market is in a bubble. As investors and homeowners have learned the hard way, those with corrupt financial or professional incentives cannot be relied upon to provide trustworthy advice.
From a financial and industry perspective, here is what you need to know. Vaccines are licensed by the FDA and recommended by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Vaccine manufacturers perform (or outsource) their own efficacy and safety studies, so there is plenty of wiggle room for juggling the data. Manufacturers can choose their own placebo to either flatter efficacy or safety. If you think vaccine safety studies use saline solution for a placebo, think again.
The Merck Manual (the pharmaceutical company’s best-selling series of medical textbooks) defines an adverse reaction to a vaccine: “Encephalitis is inflammation of the brain that occurs when a virus directly infects the brain or when a virus or something else triggers inflammation…. Encephalitis can occur in the following ways: A virus directly infects the brain. A virus that caused an infection in the past becomes reactivated and directly damages the brain. A virus or vaccine triggers a reaction that makes the immune system attack brain tissue (an autoimmune reaction).”
Thus, an adverse vaccine reaction that causes brain damage (encephalitis) has the same result as a complication from an infectious disease like measles. In vaccine safety studies, manufacturers can disguise the neurological damage caused by the vaccine they are testing by using another vaccine (or another substance that contains an aluminum adjuvant) known to cause neurological adverse reactions as placebo. The standard language they use is: “Adverse reactions were no different than placebo.” They don’t mention that the placebo causes neurological adverse reactions…
