Before December 9, Jackson Presley Diamond was a healthy kid. He’d learned to crawl, sit, walk, and run right on schedule. At 18 months he was starting to talk and was rapidly accumulating vocabulary words. He liked to stack blocks and knock them down, and when he heard music—his father, Lee, plays drums in the local punk duo the Douglass Kings—he’d pull his parents up from their chairs to dance with him. After December 9 he could do none of those things.
After receiving antibiotics for bacterial infections such as meningitis and pneumonia, Jackson was transferred to the intensive care unit at Children’s Memorial Hospital, where doctors began furiously trying to diagnose his condition. Within a few days tests revealed that Jackson had encephalopathy—damage to the brain. But no one could say what had caused it.
Doctors were stumped. They explored several possibilities—including his having been strangled—subsequently ruling out each and every one of them. “At one point they thought it was something related to his liver,” Lee recalls. “At another point they thought it was genetic. Or viral. Or maybe he got suffocated. The one thing that they unilaterally told us that it couldn’t possibly be was the vaccinations.”
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Yet encephalopathy is known to be a possible side effect of the DTaP shot, one of the four Jackson received on December 8. The DTaP protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, or whooping cough, and the government acknowledges that there may be a causal relationship between the pertussis component of the shot and brain damage. On the Centers for Disease Control’s vaccine information sheet for the DTaP, permanent brain damage, coma, and “lowered consciousness” are listed as possible side effects—with the caveat that they’re “so rare it is hard to tell if they are caused by the vaccine.” John Iskander, a medical epidemiologist and pediatrician with the CDC’s immunization safety office, says doctors may not recognize encephalopathy as a vaccine reaction because it’s so rare—”on the order of one in a million.”
The CDC maintains that vaccines are extraordinarily safe and effective. They undergo a battery of tests before they’re licensed by the FDA and recommended for use by the CDC, which publishes a childhood immunization schedule. States then adopt it, making the vaccines mandatory. Proof of immunization is required to enroll children in school, though every state allows for medical and religious exemptions, and 18 states—Illinois is not among them—allow for so-called philosophical exemptions.
The Diamonds say that after Jackson’s seizure the doctors told them he couldn’t be having a vaccine reaction because vaccine reactions don’t present themselves so quickly. (Children’s Memorial Hospital wouldn’t make Jackson’s physicians available for comment.) It was only after Chaney followed an Internet link to the Department of Health and Human Services’ vaccine injury table that the Diamonds learned otherwise. Studying the table, a document the government refers to when handling compensation claims, they found encephalopathy listed as a possible reaction to the pertussis vaccine if it occurs within 72 hours and doctors can’t find any other likely cause.
VAERS can help identify patterns—collecting the names, manufacturers, and lot numbers of vaccines as well as information regarding the amount of time between their administration and the suspected reactions. But the government doesn’t study individual cases to determine whether a reported incident was anything more than a coincidence. According to Iskander, it’s virtually impossible to know how many serious neurological disorders like Jackson’s are caused by vaccines. During a recent three-and-a-half-year period, he says, seven reports of encephalopathy or encephalitis following a DTaP shot were made to VAERS out of 35 million administered doses. But even if those seven were followed up on, he says, it probably wouldn’t tell the CDC much.
