Marek's Disease and the Story of Non-Sterilizing Vaccinations

Two types of vaccine treatment

Fifty years ago Marek's caused mild paralysis in some chickens, reducing yields. This problem was solved with a vaccine. Almost all commercial chickens are now vaccinated against Marek's. Unlike the measles vaccine or the original polio vaccine, but like the flu vaccine, the avian influenza vaccine, and the vaccine which is 100 percent safe and effective after two shots, but also requires unlimited boosters, and correlates with decreased naturally immunity across all age groups and with increased danger from post-vaccination infection, and is associated with a larger incidence of extremely debilitating side effects than all other vaccinations combined, such as unexplained myocarditis in previously healthy children, and is now officially safe and effective for children despite more children dying in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated group in the abbreviated and materially inconclusive (on the record!) efficacy trial, and which occasionally causes otherwise very healthy people with no prior risk of heart disease to drop dead from massive blood clots, which were previously "misinformation" and you were a liar if you said this happened but are now classified as "rare", and which is known to cause increased concentrations of potentially dangerous toxins in the ovaries, and correlates with an increase in miscarriages and a marked decline in fertility, the Marek's vaccine is "leaky".

Non-sterilizing vaccines: what could possibly go wrong?

"Leaky" is highly technical language. It may seem, to those of us who aren’t pharmaceutical company CEOs with profitable Defense Department contracts to inject American soldiers with experimental vaccines which correlate 100 percent with debilitating chronic illness, as if it means "they're lying and this isn't a real vaccine and it doesn't work", but what "leaky" means is highly technical. The Marek's vaccine preserves chickens from the symptoms of the disease (we hope) but doesn't prevent them from becoming infected and contagious. Instead of a sterilizing vaccine which effectively wipes out the disease (as was achieved in the U.S. with the original polio vaccine), the leaky Marek's vaccine resulted in mutated strains of Marek's which are now extremely deadly, perhaps because, in the words of Harvard Medical School graduate Michael Crichton, "life finds a way" -- and the Marek's vaccine doesn't kill the Marek's virus, it just shoves it under the featherbed. This has been known for well over a decade (see, for example, Gimeno 2008 in “Vaccine”, Witter 1998 in “Poultry Science”, Boodhoo et. al. 2016 in “Veterinary Research”) which is one reason why many previously highly-respected but, now that they disagree with industry-captured government agencies and people with a journalism degree, obviously incompetent, epidemiologists and virologists have been trying to spread the misinformation that widespread use of a leaky vaccine in humans might be a bad idea. We should obviously listen to television news anchors, who can read a teleprompter, and government bureaucrats, who can sometimes, and not to the top scientists in the field, who in speaking out and thus losing very lucrative grants and contracts from the drug companies and government agencies they criticize are clearly just self-interested and don’t understand the science.

You may be wondering if leaky vaccines given to people could result in a potentially dangerous disease mutation as with Marek's in chickens. The answer to that is, of course, absolutely not -- and if it does, rest assured pharmaceutical companies will come up with new vaccines to sell. So there's nothing to be concerned about. This was just a boring history lesson and any comparison to recent events is entirely unintended.

Natural immunity? What’s that?

Of course the alternative to treating a marginally dangerous illness with widespread use of non-sterilizing, “leaky” vaccines which directly cause viral mutations that greatly increase mortality, assuming the leaky vaccines even work, is to focus instead on overall population health of the flock (such as plenty of fresh air, exercise, and a natural diet), offer extra care to those which become ill, and allow the population to develop natural immunity to the virus over time, since natural immunity to even a mild strain is apparently effective against all variants. Officially, this practice doesn’t work, however, as widespread empirical observations to the contrary don’t count as data since they don’t take place in industry-funded labs. If you think that’s clearly wrong, and that to pursue as the only possible solution a schedule of constant vaccinations which are proven to make the disease more dangerous over time is criminally insane and everyone involved in such an obviously corrupt fiasco should be locked up, you don’t know what you’re talking about and you should stop spreading misinformation.

Our meat chickens are vaccinated against Marek's. We like our local family-run hatchery, and since they have to vaccinate for the larger commercial growers, they don't have any feasible means of vaccinating only some of the eggs but not others. It's too bad farmers didn't make a better decision about using a known "leaky" vaccine fifty years ago, or about believing the pharmaceutical sales representatives and the government regulators who rubber-stamped their recommendations.

Follow “the science”

In order to be better informed, we should clearly listen to talking heads on TV. Reading actual peer-reviewed published research is foolish. Simple, common-sense solutions which don’t require expensive and potentially dangerous chemicals are obviously not the answer to any of our problems. When deciding which “experts” are most credible, we should always give credence to those who are paid the most by corporate industry, and not to those who sacrifice lucrative paychecks in order to speak out. Speaking out is best done with the tongue thrust sideways into the inside of the cheek.

100 years of medical science and a modern diet

According to U.S. CDC Data in 1998 the leading cause of death in the United States was heart disease, at 31 percent of all cause mortality. (The next leading cause was cancerous tumors.)

In 1900, 7.9 percent of all cause mortality was heart disease.

The leading cause of death in 1900 was pneumonia and influenza. (It’s difficult to tell these two apart as a cause of death. In fact, many respiratory ailments present with similar symptoms, such that without a lot of work it’s difficult to isolate cause of death to one specific respiratory disease. Of course, if you have a test that will ensure you diagnose one particular ailment and you receive extra funding for treating patients with that particular ailment, you may find that almost all your respiratory patients serendipitously happen to become diagnosed with that particular ailment.) That percentage of all cause mortality was 11.7 percent. Curiously, after 98 years of medical science pursuing relief from this age-old harbinger of finality, pneumonia and influenza are still in the top 10 causes of death in the U.S., at 3.9 percent. (Suicide is in the top 10 in 1998. Suicide joins the top 10 causes of mortality in 1975. It wasn’t in the top 10 all through the Great Depression. Isn’t all the ease and convenience of modern life supposed to be making people…happier?)

I don’t know the specifics of how the bigjobs of medical science ran their profession in 1900. I assume there were various unsavory practices such as vivisection, along with administering experimental pharmaceutical therapies to populations without adequately informing them of the risks — something that is, thankfully, now illegal and thus never happens. (If it did happen, of course, those responsible would be swiftly brought to justice.) Quite possibly there were a number of shady businessmen back then selling ineffective quack cures just to make a dirty dollar. Today, of course, we are assured that the modern medical pharmaceutical industry is impeccably regulated and basically exists only to serve the greater good.

Still, looking at those numbers objectively, it appears that 98 years of pharmaceutical and medical industriousness managed to decrease deaths (as a portion of total) from pneumonia-influenza by two thirds, while at the same time almost quadrupling deaths from heart disease. I am not a doctor, but I think that is not a track record to be proud of. Succumbing to a respiratory ailment is always going to involve some amount of bad luck, but if the causes of heart disease are, as medical science suggest, internal, it should be easy to regulate. That’s probably why ads for the American Heart Association don’t tout the increase in percent of deaths from heart disease in every year their Association has been associating. It appears that if you simply ate and exercised like Americans did in 1900 and ignored medical advice about diet and pharmacology — including all that stuff about the health benefits of smoking tobacco or how you could supposedly take a synthetic opioid and really, totally, absolutely, cross-your-heart never get addicted — you might be healthier than otherwise. Presumably, of course, if anyone were to buy medical journals and pay doctors to completely accidentally and totally not on purpose fail to tell the truth about something like that, then those responsible would be swiftly brought to justice.

To give the bonesaws their just praise, however, deaths from non-motor vehicle accidents have also decreased more than 2/3. So if you happen to get your shirtsleeve caught in the tablesaw you really, really want to be going to a modern hospital. Though of course the real heroes are the sanitation engineers. Almost nobody dies from diarrhea these days and it was a huge cause of death in 1900.

Lest you think that it’s just all the carbs Americans eat these days that are causing heart disease, consumption of carbohydrates went down during the 20th century and fat consumption increased. Saturated fat consumption stayed about the same; what increased was consumption of things like linoleic acid, which, prior to the temporary discovery by the medical industry that these were healthy, had previously been useful in manufacturing items such as paint. Indeed, over the past 100 years or so Americans shifted from eating a lot of farm-raised pork and milk fat along with a moderate amount of beef fat from lean, grass-fed beef, to eating less pork fat, less milk fat, fattier grain-fed beef, and much more hydrogenated vegetable oils. Crude fiber intake also decreased by about a third. It would be very interesting to see nutrition profiles of common foods grown using 1900s soil and farming practices compared with present-day, but that’s likely impossible. It seems a reasonable hypothesis to assume that if the only thing you add to soil is a modern industrial N-P-K fertilizer, various trace nutrients which might have once been present in food grown therein, which are added through natural fertilizers such as animal manure, are not going to be present in anything like their original scale. Again, over the same period of dietary progress, deaths from heart disease quadrupled as a portion of all cause mortality. (Actual heart-attacks have increased more than that, of course, but modern science is relatively good at keeping a patient alive and on drugs until some future, second heart attack causes death.)

The typical middle-class American family in 1900 had a small garden. They bought fresh, natural food from local farmers or grocers, canned or preserved it themselves, and cooked at home. The lack of modern labor-saving devices like dishwashers and washing machines meant that the family of 1900 did not have the copious free time every working middle class couple with children presumably enjoys today. Instead of the soul-affirming technological achievement of the family separately watching separate entertainments on separate screens, a family might have been forced to spend a day off together, picking cucumbers from the garden and pickling them while taking turns reading a storybook out loud. The reader will likely have some understanding of what the typical middle class family of today eats and how they spend their time.

Then again, the food that Americans ate in 1900 was really expensive. Households spent 43 percent of income on food. Housing was 23 percent and clothing was the next most expensive item of a household budget. These days American households spend closer to 10 percent of the budget on food. Cheaper materials and labor-saving technologies (along with low-cost, some would say criminally exploited, immigrant construction labor) have, however, somehow coincided with a 40 percent increase in housing costs. The other big ticket item Americans spend money on today is transportation. In 1900 one would typically work at home or close to home, shop locally, supplement with a home garden, and cook and eat at home. A shopping trip would be an all-day affair perhaps involving a visit to friends and family along the way. In these more progressive modern times most Americans have the luxury of driving an automobile to work, driving an automobile to a takeout chain for lunch, driving an automobile to a store, and purchasing food grown by strangers a thousand miles away or more.

Food was different, as well. In 1900, a chicken dinner would be a cockerel which had been foraging in the field on a varied diet, stewed to improve tenderness in a homemade stock made from its bones. Today, a large number of Americans don’t have a clue how to roast a chicken, but if they do it’s a genetic hybrid specially bred to grow in a third of the time of the 1900 chicken while sitting in a small cage and eating a diet engineered to pack on as much meat as possible in that short time at the lowest possible cost, plus a vitamin powder reasonably sufficient to prevent the chicken from dying prematurely.

At least most people don’t die from measles these days. In 1900 without a measles vaccine, 7,575 patients died from measles, 0.009 percent of the population. Today, due to the assistance of the $1.3 trillion U.S. biopharmaceutical industry, we can be assured that something less than 0.009 percent of Americans die from the measles. Lest someone scoff at such a tiny number, this really is a big deal: measles mostly affects young children, and that pre-vaccine measles death number is more than three times all the deaths in the 5-9 age group in 2019. Is that reduction the result of the vaccine or, say, better sanitation? We may never know.

Looking again at all cause mortality, now sorted by age, almost all deaths from heart disease occur after the age of 65. It might be interesting to know how soon after the age of 65 these numbers pick up, but the CDC, which is staffed by pharmaceutical industry insiders who presumably went into government service because they care deeply about the health and well-being of each individual citizen, tracks data in discrete cohorts right up to retirement age and then lumps those of retirement age who are no longer paying payroll taxes into one big catch-all category. Furthermore, as with most respiratory ailments, deadly influenza or pneumonia almost exclusively affects those well over 65 years in age. So perhaps the choice is between falling asleep due to pneumonia-induced low blood oxygen and passing away peacefully in old age at home after a final tearful but meaningful visit from your children and grandchildren, or having an extremely painful myocardial infarction, being rushed to the hospital where you are stripped naked, tubes are shoved into you and your chest cavity is cracked open before time of death is determined and your surviving family members are presented with the bill. Either way, for those who make it to 65 the average life expectancy is around 85 total years these days, which is around 5 years more of being in and out of hospitals and eventually confined to an assisted facility than it was 80 years ago, where you might have to spend your final years spoiling your grandchildren.

This all applies only to the United States. If you live, today, in say, sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps most of your most arable land is now devoted to producing cash crops for the global market on behalf of global corporations which are totally, absolutely, one hundred percent not imperialistic looting operations (just look at the “Commitment to Diversity” statement in their Annual Report to Shareholders), and you might have the opportunity to roll the dice by having your children injected with a vaccine known to correlate with a higher rate of mortality than it prevents. Of course, drug dealers would like us all to know (sorry, I mean public interest-oriented pharmaceutical companies and billionaire philanthropists whose selfless philanthropy has somehow preserved and increased their billions) they ship such therapies overseas in mass quantities because of their philanthropic focus, and not because of a potential $5 billion market or the prospect of reducing labor costs by shifting production overseas at the “local prevailing wage”.

But hey, I mean, “safe and effective”, right?

A note on cured meats

What is cured meat?

Cured products such as bacon are typically (more on this later) made by adding nitrates or nitrites to a brine mixture.  (A nitrite is basically a nitrate minus an oxygen atom.)  A standard cure uses sodium nitrite.  An alternative is to use something like celery powder.  Celery powder is naturally high in sodium nitrate. 

Nitrates and nitrites

Besides celery, some other vegetables such as spinach contain relatively large amounts of nitrates.  A large percentage of the nitrates you consume probably comes from vegetable sources, not cured meats.  The human body converts some ingested nitrates into nitrites.  Regardless of the source, your digestive system normally handles these with no problem. 

If, however, something goes awry in your digestive system, sometimes nitrites in meat can instead convert to nitrosamines, which you may have heard may be a risk factor for cancer.  It's up to you how much weight you give in the real world to laboratory findings that something is a statistically significant risk factor.  Entire books have been written about what "statistically significant" really means.  Nitrates in fresh vegetables don't normally turn into nitrosamines because most of these vegetables don't contain amines, since amines are normally associated with proteins.  No amines, no nitros-amines.   

It's not clear what are all the factors that can contribute to nitrosamine production.  Could the quality of the meat (CAFO vs. pasture-raised) be a factor?  Could what the animal ate be a factor?  Could the addition of chemical preservatives or artificial colorings be a factor?

There is no such thing as "uncured bacon"

Simply put, there is no such thing as "uncured" bacon.  Bacon is by definition cured.  And most "nitrate-free" bacon is not nitrate free at all: products labeled as such simply contain nitrate from celery powder (and will have a small note that this is the case, under the gigantic "Nitrate Free" label).  Since this nitrate is consumed with the meat and not as a fresh stalk of celery, it gets digested along with the same amine groups present with a standard cure.  So...if there is a health risk, is this reducing it at all?  In fact, it might be easier to measure how much nitrates and nitrites are added to a standard cure than it is to determine exactly how much is naturally present in any given batch of celery powder used for curing.  

You can make your own nitrate-free* cured meat

(* Well, "no nitrates added" would be more accurate.  Since nitrates occur naturally, you'd have to somehow remove them all to be "nitrate free".) 

Cured meat products are typically made with added nitrates or nitrites, but obviously cured meats have been around a lot longer than synthetic sodium nitrite or celery powder.  The benefit of including nitrates and nitrites in the cure is that doing so significantly reduces the risk of botulism.  However, you can find plenty of recipes for how to take pork belly and salt-cure it at home using a homemade brine.  It's like home canning: there are risks, so it's important to know what you are doing.  But it's certainly possible and plenty of people do it all the time.

We take no sides in the health debate.  It's possible one or other type of cure is healthier.  We don't know.  We simply encourage you to educate yourself and make whatever decision you think is best for you.  We hope this explanation helps with that!  We do think that cured meats are nutritious and delicious, and therefore worth eating and appreciating in moderation.