A Peanut Allergy Vaccine?

An article appeared in Medical News Today in April about a vaccine that is being developed in an attempt to suppress peanut allergies in children. It begins:

The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) deem food allergies "a growing food safety and public health concern." 

They estimate that 4–6 percent of all children in the United States are affected by food allergies, though other reports reveal that percentage to be much higher. 

Of all food allergies, those to peanuts are the most common. 

Food allergies do not yet have a cure, and allergic reactions can prove fatal. In fact, the only way to "prevent" allergies is to stay away from the allergen.

 The article goes on to say that:

A new study, however, offers hope for people with peanut allergies, as a vaccine that has been two decades in the making has just been proven successful in mice. 

The research — which has now been published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology — was carried out by scientists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They were led by Jessica O'Konek, a researcher at the university's Food Allergy Centre. 

O'Konek and team explain that food allergies are caused by a faulty immune reaction, wherein the body overproduces antibodies called Immunoglobulin E (IgE). 

This occurs as a result of a skewed immune response from immune cells called T helper 2 (Th2). In the new research, the scientists hypothesised that rerouting these Th2 cells might help to regulate the allergic immune response. 

To test this hypothesis, O'Konek and colleagues sensitised mice to peanut proteins so that their immune system produced IgE antibodies and their Th2 cells behaved in the same way that they would in an allergic reaction. 

When exposed to peanuts, the rodents thusly sensitised developed the same allergic symptoms, such as itchy skin and obstructed breathing, as humans. 

The researchers then administered the rodents one dose of the nasal vaccine per month for 3 months, and they measured their allergic response 2 weeks after the final dose. 

The vaccine successfully protected the rodents from exposure to peanuts, with tests showing decreased activity of the Th2 cells, as well as decreased IgE antibodies.

Food allergies have exploded in prevalence and incidence over the past two decades or so but there is seemingly no thought been given as to why this might be so. Could the reason be the damage caused to the immune systems of young children by vaccinations? The dramatic increase in the number of vaccines since 1960 is dramatically portrayed below (double click to enlarge):

A little investigation led me a book called The History of the Peanut Allergy Epidemic by Heather Fraser that was published in 2010. Here the review of the book that I came across. To quote directly from her book:

Medical literature has illustrated that the only means by which mass allergy has ever been created was by injection. With the pairing of the hypodermic needles and vaccines at the close of the 19th century, allergy and anaphylaxis made their explosive entry into the western world. Serum sickness from this new procedure was the first mass allergic phenomenon in history. Epidemic allergy to penicillin reminiscent of the ‘days of serum sickness’ emerged with its mass application following WWII. And with it came peanut allergy. Penicillin was administered using POB, the Romansky peanut oil formula. The continued use of refined peanut oil in drugs and vaccine adjuvants resulted in the slow growth of the allergy primarily in children until the late 1980s when its prevalence exploded. Extensive and sudden changes to childhood vaccination precipitated the new mass allergy to peanut.

Here is a recent video from January of 2018 in which she talks about the experiences that led her to write the book.

The influence of her book and her ongoing campaigning to make vaccination a choice seem to have had little effect on the medical establishment as this current push for a peanut allergy vaccine demonstrates. 

Well, it's depressing but hardly surprising. The following quotation from the same review is a good note to end on. 

Vaccines had proved to be very profitable for the pharmaceutical companies in the early years of the 20th century and, once they had been protected from litigation by those who believed they or their children had been damaged by vaccination by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme, the pharmaceutical companies ‘went back into’ vaccine manufacture with a will. 

But this time there was an added bonus. 

Although the connection between the two was never made, the increase in allergy across the board during the 1970s and 80s, including potentially fatal anaphylaxis, offered a whole new market to pharmaceutical companies and, indeed to the food industry. 

The development of the Epipen in the 1980s, delivering the only known antidote to an anaphylactic attack, proved to be a commercial goldmine while managing allergy presented endless opportunities for new drugs and new treatments 

Meanwhile, the ‘freefrom’ food industry (now, in 2010, worth billions of dollars world wide) was born – creating foods which would be free of peanuts, nuts, dairy, wheat and any of the any food products which were thought to cause allergy. 

I managed to get hold of Heather Fraser's book via the Internet Archive and I'm currently reading it online. Here is quote from the book:

The key phrase is "each society and every civilization creates its own diseases" struck a responsive chord in me. I thought of the Romans poisoning themselves with lead pipes and drinking vessels. The heavy metal poisoning causes by purgatives in the nineteenth century and now the autoimmune diseases exacerbated by vaccinations. I'll report further on the book once I finish it.