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Influenza vaccine as possible cause for cfs/me - help needed

caledonia

Senior Member
But you get more mercury from eating a can of tuna than you do from a vaccine shot, and I don't know many people who have contracted ME/CFS or any other disease after eating a tuna salad or sandwich.

In a vaccine, you get around 10 to 25 mcg of ethylmercury. In a can of tuna, you get around 40 mcg of methylmercury — and 95% of orally ingested methylmercury is absorbed into the body, plus methylmercury is far more neurotoxic and bioaccumulative than ethylmercury.

So that suggests that mercury in vaccines is not doing much harm at all.

Oh God, don't tell me we're going to go around with this again.

The thing is - it all adds up. Mercury is the second most neurotoxic substance in the world behind radioactive polonium. Once mercury goes into your body, it doesn't come back out readily. The more mercury you have, the more it screws up your ability to detox, then more mercury and other toxins can accumulate into a downward spiral.

The thimerosal from a vaccine is injected directly into your bloodstream, which is different from eating it.

So is one vaccine with thimerosal going to cause you to have ME? Probably not.

But start adding up all your lifetime exposures. First off, in utero and breastfeeding, you acquire 60% of your mother's body burden. So if your mother had mercury fillings, thimerosal vaccines, and other exposures, you would get 60% of that. Then you get your own vaccines, you breath air from coal fired power plants, or crematoriums, or other industry, then you eat fish, then you broke a fluorescent bulb, or a mercury thermometer, etc. etc. etc.

Not only that, but the mercury reacts synergistically with other metals - like aluminum, arsenic, lead, cadmium. The combination of mercury + lead for example, is many times worse than just lead alone. Then you have other chemicals, formaldehyde, flame retardants, pesticides, herbicides, etc. etc. all accumulating.

Up to this point, you might feel healthy because your body is masking the exposures. Then you get a final vaccine. Now it's the last straw and your body can't handle any more. Your immune system is compromised because of the mercury, and it's also hit with a virus - boom, you become very sick.

Then you can't recover because you have no idea it's caused by mercury or if you did, how to get it safely back out.

ps. If I can find the section in one of the mercury or vaccine documentaries that explains the damage from thimerosal vs. fish I'll post it. I think it's in Trace Amounts.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
Mercury is the second most neurotoxic substance in the world

Mercury (mercury II chloride) comes 21st in this list of toxicity, as measured by the LD50, with botulinum toxin coming first. I could not find a list specific for neurotoxicity.



The thimerosal from a vaccine is injected directly into your bloodstream, which is different from eating it.

No there is not much difference, since 95% of orally ingested methylmercury is absorbed straight into the bloodstream. See here:
The maximum blood methylmercury concentration was found 6 hours after food exposure, and 95% of intake was absorbed



But start adding up all your lifetime exposures.

If you think about it logically for a minute, you see that this does not make sense. Yes, mercury is an accumulated toxin, and you can slowly increase the levels in your body over the years, which if they get high enough may cause some health issues. Most exposure to mercury is from eating fish, mercury amalgams, or industrial exposure.

However, the very tiny amount of extra mercury that you get from a single vaccine is going to be a drop in the ocean compared to the lifetime of accumulated mercury. Therefore, you would not expect that tiny amount of extra mercury to suddenly make a catastrophically huge difference to your health, as happens when people are healthy one day, and then the next day after vaccination they have ME/CFS.



Then you get a final vaccine. Now it's the last straw and your body can't handle any more.

The body just does not work like this. There is no "last straw" effect with toxins, where one tiny extra bit of a toxin suddenly throws you from health into ill health. These things are generally dose dependent.

If there were a "last straw" effect, then you would see people suddenly developing ME/CFS after eating a tuna salad, when they will ingest around 40 mcg of methylmercury.

And people with 8 amalgam filings in their mouth will absorb up to 70 mcg of elemental mercury each day (see this post), some of which is converted to methylmercury by gut bacteria. So the amount of extra mercury you get from a vaccine (10 to 25 mcg) is totally negligible compared to the amount you get every day from amalgam filings, and from tuna fish.

The only way I can see that mercury from a vaccine could trigger illness is if there were some special effects that only occur with thimerosal and its breakdown product ethylmercury. But I have not seen any studies that indicate this.



I should add that some studies have found an association between hair or blood levels of mercury, and autoantibodies or autoimmunity (and as we know, ME/CFS may well be an autoimmune disease). However, those studies are looking at the total accumulated levels of mercury in the body.
 
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HowToEscape?

Senior Member
Messages
626
Oh God, don't tell me we're going to go around with this again.

The thing is - it all adds up. Mercury is the second most neurotoxic substance in the world behind radioactive polonium.

There are quite a few things more neurotoxic that elemental or ethyl mercury. Several snake venoms, several types of nerve agent and many others. Diethylmercury and dimethylmercury are highly toxic (still less than Botox), but they are not used in Thiomersal or any medicine -ever- approved by the FDA.

You may say 'but all things with mercury in their name are the same' yet this is false. In the '50s, kids sometimes played with blobs of elemental mercury, and those people are still walking and talking today. That wasn't a great idea (!), and the practice was halted soon after, but it wasn't fatal; in elemental form little is absorbed through one's skin, and most is excreted and not absorbed into the body. Had they been handling that quantity of dimethylmercury, none would have survived, that substance is lethal in droplet quantities and is absorbed through the skin.

In any case, mercury is a natural element (there's lots of it in ordinary coal), and there a bit in any vegetable or fruit grown outdoors, and a little falling from the sky whenever it rains, and there's more than a tiny bit in large fish, enough that it's possible to get mercury poisoning by eating enough canned tuna. If you really want to avoid all mercury, then you'll need to avoid all fish larger than sardines, all tuna, ever, any vegetables or fruits grown with rainwater and many grown from groundwater... and rain, and air on rainy days, and ....
 

SuzieSam

Senior Member
Messages
201
Location
Israel
In the case of ME/CFS triggered by vaccines, I would not have thought that adjuvants getting deposited in the body long term would be a factor, because as I understand it, vaccine-triggered ME/CFS when it does occur appears very rapidly (within days) of the vaccination. So this suggests more of an immediate response to the vaccine, rather than any long term effects of a bioaccummulated adjuvant.

@Hip he's said that it can take a few years for the damage to manifest. Can't find the article, but it can take time for symptoms to become evident. But I still can't find how you prove it was the vaccine.

The definite, immediate response is Macrophagic Myofasciitis Syndrome, where the aluminium used as an adjuvant in the vaccination causes a nasty inflammation at the injection site.

http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-11-118

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fneur.2015.00004/full

http://www.vaccinetruth.org/autoimmune.html

From the above:
"Vaccine trials have usually excluded "vulnerable" individuals -- only extremely healthy individuals with no allergies are recruited. It's a "selection bias," say Soriano and Shoenfeld, and has likely resulted in serious adverse events being "considerably underestimated" in "real life where vaccines are mandated to all individuals regardless of their susceptibility." The true incidence of allergic reactions to vaccines, normally estimated at between one in 50,000 to one in a million doses, is probably much higher and particularly where gelatin or egg proteins are on the ingredients list, they say.

There's a long list of vaccine ingredients that are potential allergens: besides the infectious agents themselves, there are those from hen's egg, horse serum, baker's yeast, numerous antibiotics, formaldehyde and lactose, as well "inadvertent" ingredients such as latex. People's allergic histories have to be taken before vaccination say the researchers. But some signs of reaction don't show up until after the shot.

The public health nurse or GP might tell patients that a long-lasting swelling around the injection site after a vaccine is a normal reaction, for example. But that is not what the immunologists say. "[A]luminum sensitization manifests as nodules [hard lumps] at the injection site that often regress after weeks or months, but may persist for years." In such cases, they say, a patch test can be done to confirm sensitivity and to avoid vaccination."

My babies both had hard lumps in their thighs after their vaccinations. The next vaccination my daughter had was the Hep B at 7. If she was already sensitised as a baby, maybe this caused her to react.

I've read that aluminium gravitated to the pineal gland - the cause of her sudden sleep disorder?

Fibromyalgia - accumulation of aluminium in her muscles?

Clearly, I've got to get my kids tested for aluminium sensitivity.
 
Messages
2,087
If you look at this post, which details the contents of a videoed presentation by Shoenfeld, he says that the only vaccine that has never been linked to triggering any autoimmune disease is Pneumovax, and this also happens to be the only vaccine that does not contain any adjuvants.

I thought seasonal flu vaccines didn't contain adjuvants ( at least not until very recently and even then not all variants)
 

Thomas

Senior Member
Messages
325
Location
Canada
I thought seasonal flu vaccines didn't contain adjuvants ( at least not until very recently and even then not all variants)
They do contain adjuvants. The injection type do at least. I'm not sure about the live flu mist vaccine though. I think aluminum is way more of an issue than mercury in it's ability to trigger ME/CFS and similar illnesses. I don't believe it's from a lifetime exposure type thing as @Hip said but seems to be more of an aggressive immune response to the vaccine's aluminum content. Then, if one already has an infection, or comes by another infection, then the immune system is too busy dealing with the vaccine and the other infection can become chronic. I believe this is why in certain immunological drug commercials such as those that treat autoimmune diseases, the manufacturer states not to get a vaccine within x number of days before beginning the medication.

It's not that the lifetime accumulation of toxins has built up to the point where the last vaccine's trace amount of aluminum is the straw that broke the camel's back but moreso the lifetime accumulation of immune and gut dysfunction that finally spilled over, or broke, when a vaccine was administered and the immune response to that vaccine was too much for the host.

At least that's what I think happened to me. And I've met many others who also got sick 10 days or so after the shot. Oddly enough, 10-14 days is the typical average timeframe for Guillan-Bare Syndrome to start following a flu shot, and even mainstream doctors are aware and agree that flu shots can trigger GBS.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
I thought seasonal flu vaccines didn't contain adjuvants ( at least not until very recently and even then not all variants)

Very interesting, I did not know that. I wonder why Prof Shoenfeld seems to think that the only adjuvant-free vaccine is Pneumovax?

It says here that:
In the United States, vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, rotavirus, polio, and seasonal influenza vaccines do not contain added adjuvants.
So there seem to be several vaccines that do not employ adjuvants, at least in the US.

Apparently the new FLUAD flu vaccine does contain an adjuvant, but in general it seems seasonal influenza vaccines do not use adjuvants.

It also says that:
Some vaccines made from weakened or dead germs contain naturally occurring adjuvants and help the body produce a strong protective immune response.

However, most vaccines developed today include just small components of germs, such as their proteins, rather than the entire virus or bacteria. These vaccines often must be made with adjuvants to ensure the body produces an immune response strong enough to protect the patient from the germ he or she is being vaccinated against.
So it seems that if you use whole microbes, an adjuvant may not be necessary, but if you use the extracted antigen components of microbes, then an adjuvant is often required.



@Hip he's said that it can take a few years for the damage to manifest. Can't find the article, but it can take time for symptoms to become evident. But I still can't find how you prove it was the vaccine.

The definite, immediate response is Macrophagic Myofasciitis Syndrome, where the aluminium used as an adjuvant in the vaccination causes a nasty inflammation at the injection site.

I've read about macrophagic myofasciitis before, and its link to aluminium-containing vaccines; but it is not clear whether this has any relation to the autoimmune diseases that can appear after vaccination. From the ME/CFS perspective, I think it is the possible triggering of autoimmunity by vaccination that is the area of most interest. The pathophysiology of macrophagic myofasciitis may or may not be related to this apparent triggering of autoimmunity.

In any case, I don't think it is only the adjuvant that may be responsible for triggering autoimmunity, because in the case of ME/CFS, some vaccines like the hepatitis B vaccine have a far higher track record of triggering ME/CFS than other vaccines (and I don't think the hep B vaccine has higher levels of adjuvant). So there must be other factors in the vaccine that play a role, such as the microbe or antigens themselves. There must be some reason why the hepatitis B vaccine appears to be able to trigger ME/CFS much more than other vaccines.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
Ethyl mercury vs methyl mercury

That traceamounts.com video you posted says (at timecode 0.35) that the "thimerosal exposed monkeys had twice the amount of inorganic mercury locked in their brain", compared to monkeys eating methylmercury.

However, that statement is not the complete picture, because according to the 2005 Dr Burbacher study referred to in that video, the study found that in infant monkeys:
Brain concentrations of total Hg were significantly lower by approximately 3-fold for the thimerosal-exposed monkeys when compared with the MeHg infants
So 3 times as much mercury got into the brain when eating methylmercury (such as you get in tuna fish), compared to injections with thimerosal.

But they found that:
A higher percentage of the total Hg in the brain was in the form of inorganic Hg for the thimerosal-exposed monkeys (34% vs. 7%).
So a higher percentage of the mercury was in the inorganic form in thimerosal-exposed monkeys. Note that inorganic mercury is the least toxic form of mercury (ref: 1). Inorganic mercury is usually in the form of mercury (II) chloride, by the way.

However, the downside is that the half life of inorganic mercury in the brain is thought to be in the order of several years to several decades (although there is much uncertainly in this), whereas the half life of methylmercury in the brain is shown to be around 50 days. So the inorganic mercury sticks around in the brain a lot longer.


In summary: in the study, thimerosal injection led to 3 times less total mercury in the brain, compared to eating methylmercury (eg, from tuna fish). However, thimerosal injection introduced around twice as much inorganic mercury into the brain as methylmercury, and this inorganic mercury, although the least toxic form of mercury, does stick around a lot longer in the brain.

Nevertheless, eating a tuna salad containing 40 mcg of methylmercury is going to deposit about same amount of inorganic mercury in your brain as a thimerosal vaccine with 25 mcg of ethylmercury; and regarding the total amount of mercury introduced, in all its forms: the tuna salad will deposit around 5 times more mercury in your brain than a thimerosal vaccine.
 
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Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
So I'm researching and collecting cases research and scientific papers about this subject. If any of you point me to such info it would be great!

Returning to the request for scientific papers about vaccine-triggered ME/CFS:

In this published correspondence from ME/CFS specialist Dr Chia, he finds that in 200 consecutive cases of ME/CFS that saw in his practice, 3 of them were attributable to vaccination.

So that suggests that around 1.5% of cases of ME/CFS may be due to vaccination.


This paper looks at the link between hepatitis B vaccination and ME/CFS.
 

Skippa

Anti-BS
Messages
841
I have to say this, because something tells me it may be related in some way, please let me know what you think (anyone).

Alpha-gal allergy.

Eat meat == alpha gal flows around the blood stream, everything is fine. Eat lots of meat over one's lifetime, get exposed to lots of alpha gal intoduced via the GI system, everything is fine.

Get bitten one day by the lone star tick, get exposed to alpha gal in the tick wound, suddenly all hell breaks loose and the person has developed an alpha gal allergy. Eat meat now == allergic reaction to alpha gal in the blood.

Why? Alpha gal via the GI system == fine, alpha gal via a shot in the arm (tick bite) == allergy.

Can anyone see the resemblance to a shot in the arm?

Have I missed something?

Is there something inherent about intoducing something via a shot in the arm that is causing problems versus breathing it in or ingesting it? (Like normal diseases).
 

drob31

Senior Member
Messages
1,487
I have to say this, because something tells me it may be related in some way, please let me know what you think (anyone).

Alpha-gal allergy.

Eat meat == alpha gal flows around the blood stream, everything is fine. Eat lots of meat over one's lifetime, get exposed to lots of alpha gal intoduced via the GI system, everything is fine.

Get bitten one day by the lone star tick, get exposed to alpha gal in the tick wound, suddenly all hell breaks loose and the person has developed an alpha gal allergy. Eat meat now == allergic reaction to alpha gal in the blood.

Why? Alpha gal via the GI system == fine, alpha gal via a shot in the arm (tick bite) == allergy.

Can anyone see the resemblance to a shot in the arm?

Have I missed something?

Is there something inherent about intoducing something via a shot in the arm that is causing problems versus breathing it in or ingesting it? (Like normal diseases).


I know someone with alpha-gal and they were 100% ok as long as they didn't eat meat, and then it went away after a few years.
 
Messages
3,263
This is actually a really complicated issue. Some people's MECFS might have been triggered by a vaccine. But there could be thousands of us who might have avoided getting the illness altogether if we'd been vaccinated against the virus that caused our initial acute infection.

Of course, these vaccines don't exist yet. But one day there might be a herpes vaccination, and that could actually reduce the incidence of a great many autoimmune illnesses, as well as CFS.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
@Skippa
To make your question more general: I think what you are asking is whether injecting any substance such as a protein into the bloodstream that is capable of eliciting an antibody response could be the trigger for autoimmunity.

Certainly, once a protein is broken down by the digestive processes into its constituent amino acids, prior to absorption into the bloodstream, there is no longer any possibility of developing antibody responses, as I understand it. Proteins can be recognized and targeted by the adaptive immune response, but amino acids cannot. Rather like the fact you can recognize a photographic image, but if the image were broken down into its individual pixels, individual pixels would not mean anything to you, and there would be nothing there to recognize.

A while ago I was looking at the ingredients of the hepatitis B virus vaccine, trying to see if any in the vaccine might explain why this vaccine is considered to trigger ME/CFS more frequently than other vaccines. Two brands of hepatitis B vaccine are ENGERIX-B and Recombivax HB. Both contain small amounts of yeast protein, because the hepatitis B virus antigens that this vaccine contains are created by growing them in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast), via a recombinant process. So I wonder whether these fragments of yeast protein found in the vaccine may be the culprits.
 

Ian

Senior Member
Messages
282
It's amazing people defend the use of mercury in vaccines. Kind of reminds me of the Mellon institute producing research that said lead was safe to add to gasoline.

As for dose, sure for an adult 25 micrograms is not much of a problem. But give that same dose to a baby. In the 2000 era, kids were absolutely smashing the maximum exposure for methyl mercury (Today they receive around half this amount). If vaccines were tested like drugs, ie in combination, this would have never happened. They would have been forced to space them out. Vaccine science is quack science. Just because one is safe, doesn't mean unlimited amounts of them are.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
It's amazing people defend the use of mercury in vaccines.

It's not so much defending the use of mercury in vaccines; it more pointing out the logic of why mercury is unlikely to be a culprit in triggering the diseases that appear after vaccination such as ME/CFS or narcolepsy (narcolepsy can appear after vaccination with the HPV vaccine).

In the case of the narcolepsy appearing after vaccination with the Gardasil HPV vaccine, there isn't any mercury in that vaccine. The ingredients of Gardasil are given here:
Each 0.5 mL dose of the vaccine contains approximately 225 mcg of aluminum (as Amorphous Aluminum Hydroxyphosphate Sulfate adjuvant), 9.56 mg of sodium chloride, 0.78 mg of L-histidine, 50 mcg of polysorbate 80, 35 mcg of sodium borate, <7 mcg yeast protein/dose, and water for injection. The product does not contain a preservative or antibiotics.

And in this paper from 2004, it shows that Recombivax HB and ENGERIX-B brands of hepatitis B vaccination contain no mercury in the case Recombivax HB, and a tiny fraction of mercury (less than 0.5 mcg) in the case of ENGERIX-B (that was in 2004; the current ENGERIX-B formulation also now contains no mercury).

Yet these hepatitis B vaccinations have still been linked to triggering ME/CFS.
 

SuzieSam

Senior Member
Messages
201
Location
Israel
This is actually a really complicated issue. Some people's MECFS might have been triggered by a vaccine. But there could be thousands of us who might have avoided getting the illness altogether if we'd been vaccinated against the virus that caused our initial acute infection.

Of course, these vaccines don't exist yet. But one day there might be a herpes vaccination, and that could actually reduce the incidence of a great many autoimmune illnesses, as well as CFS.
The HPV vaccine is kind of a herpes vaccine!