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Christina England
Vactruth.com
3/15/2010

March 12^th 2010 saw six very special women from around the world, present documents and research about the HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix to the FDA by request. Never before have the FDA turned to members of the public regarding vaccine safety but in an extraordinary move this is exactly what happened. Dubbed the ‘Little Women’ by the FDA the group presented evidence that will shock the world and could have the FDA eating their words.

The six women who had become increasingly concerned about the HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix presented a power point presentation accompanied with documents showing the dangers of the HPV vaccines to the FDA. Their hope was to prove to the FDA that these two vaccines are so dangerous that they should be removed from the vaccine schedule as soon as possible.

Megan Hild passed away after an adverse reaction to a cervical cancer vaccine.

The women who were involved in this unusual move are Karen Maynor; mother of the late Megan Hild, New Mexico; Rosemary Mathis: mother of Lauren, adversely injured; co-founder of WWW.TRUTHABOUTGARDASIL.ORG, North Carolina; Freda Birrell; political activist,Scotland/UK; Leslie Carol Botha; women’s health educator and broadcast journalist, and founder of Holy Hormones Honey , Colorado; Cynthia Janak: research analyst, journalist writing for Renew America and founder of Only the Truth Illinois; and Janny Stokvis: research analyst, Netherlands.

The reports that were presented, detailed worldwide data, proving that women and young girls have suffered severe adverse reactions, including death, after being vaccinated with the HPV vaccines.

Detailed charts were shown to the FDA clearly outlining evidence of girls from around the world showing very similar adverse reactions after having these vaccines. Only a few of these adverse reactions have ever been listed by either manufacturer on their leaflets. It is my belief that Merck and Glaxo Smith Kline should to study the findings very carefully indeed.

USA – Reports show girls have suffered from

• Chronic Fatigue

• Digestive Problems

• Dizziness and Nausea

• Encephalitis

• Facial Paralysis

• Hair Loss

• Headaches

• Joint and Muscle Pain

• Loss of vision

• Menstrual Problems

• Paralysis

• Rashes/allergies

• Respiratory and Heart Problems

• Seizures

• Syncope

• Miscellaneous

Spain – Reports show girls have suffered from

• Chronic Fatigue

• Dizziness/Nausea

• Encephalitis/MS/ADEM

• Facial Paralysis

• Hair Loss

• Headaches

• Joint/Muscle Pains

• Loss of Vision

• Menstrual Changes

• Paralysis

• Rashes/Allergies

• Respiratory Heart

• Seizures

• Syncope

• Miscellaneous

Australia – Reports show girls have suffered from

• Chronic Fatigue

• Digestive/pancreatitis

• Dizziness/Nausea

• Encephalitis/MS/ADEM

• Hair Loss

• Headaches

• Joint/Muscle Pains

• Loss of Vision

• Menstrual Changes

• Paralysis

• Rashes/Allergies

• Respiratory Heart

• Seizures

• Syncope

• Miscellaneous

United Kingdom – Reports show girls have suffered from

• Chronic Fatigue

• Dizziness and Nausea

• Encephalitis

• Headaches

• Joint and Muscle Pain

• Paralysis

• Respiratory and Heart Problems

• Seizures

• Syncope

• Miscellaneous

New Zealand – Reports show that girls have suffered from

• Chronic Fatigue

• Digestive Problems

• Facial Paralysis

• Headaches

• Joint and Muscle Pain

• Paralysis

• Rashes/allergies

• Respiratory and Heart Problems

• Miscellaneous

There is a clear pattern from many countries, of girls suffering from the same side effects and yet up to now this fact has not been picked up, by either the committees who regulate our vaccines, or the Governments who sanction them. More worryingly the six women found that there were a huge number of deaths recorded on VAERS after HPV vaccines.

VAERS is the reporting system used in the USA for adverse events that happen after vaccination.

Strangely however, the system does not appear to be examined in great detail by the either Big Pharma or the Government and many adverse events are not even recorded at all, as it has now been discovered that some doctors are completely unaware of it’s existence.

The six women involved in the presentation to the FDA have been able to show research papers from top scientists and researchers showing that blindness can occur after the HPV vaccine . Papers on Menstrual evaluation were also seen for the first time as were papers on Vaccine and Autoimmune problems.

Janny Stokvis one of the women who researched the side effects of these vaccines after watching a YouTube clip said that she was horrified that so little has been done to protect women. She said she became involved completely by chance.

“In September 2008 I was looking for music on Youtube and I ended up watching a video the father of Brooke Petkevicius made. Brooke died 14 days after her first dose of Gardasil from a pulmonary embolism or blood clot on March 26th, 2007. I was shocked by her story. In our family we have a rare blood clotting disease. I have had a pulmonary embolism twice myself. Few weeks later I saw a Dutch documentary about the marketing tactics of Merck. that alarmed me even more. My daughter was in the age group to get the HPV vaccine so I started to do my own research.”

She has since studied the VAERS reporting system and now firmly believes that the reporting system is only the tip of the iceberg because it only has a small number of the actual side effects from these vaccines on. She was shocked to learn that many of the doctors she spoke to had not heard of the reporting system and said :-

“Adverse reactions do not always start within a minute after inoculation like some people think. A lot of physicians have never heard of VAERS or know how to file a report. I was surprised when I heard this the first time. Physicians do not agree with parents when they tell that they think theirs daughter got sick because of the HPV vaccine and do not want to file a report.Mothers who find their way to the Gardasil groups did not always succeed in getting a report filed at VAERS.

HPV-vaccine victims can be very ill, but tests can show-up to be normal. Girls who have seizures several times a day or who are paralysed get diagnosed as “Psychogenic”.

Parents are often told the illness of their daughter is not vaccine related This has to change, because too many girls are not getting the proper treatment yet.”

She said up until she looked into the HPV vaccines she had always believed in the Governments vaccine programmes but her confidence has now been badly shaken.

Rosemary Mathis whose daughter was changed after she had Gardasil vaccine and one of the six women told me she became involved with the group because she wanted answers. She says:-

“My 12 year old daughter was disabled by Gardasil.  Her life as she knew it completely changed after her third vaccination.  She could no longer attend school, go to church, or live a normal life.  She was always in pain and we spent thousands of dollars and many hours going to doctors who could not help her. I spent countless hours on the internet researching how to treat my daughter. I quickly learned that I was not alone and many other parents were doing the same thing. Every night was spent researching trying to figure out what do to not only help my daughter, but many others. This led me to Gardasil Mom groups on Yahoo Groups, Twitter, and Facebook. That is where I met Marian Greene, another mother whose girl was affected that lives about 30 minutes from me. Her daughter was disabled also. Both our daughters were disabled by the exact same lot # 0067X.Night after night, we were trying to help the mothers figure out what to do and trying to comment on stories on the internet to warn others. We quickly learned that many of the girls stories are not recorded in VAERS. Either the parents do not know about VAERS and haven’t reported them or the doctors do not. I filed my daughter’s report in VAERS and then asked my doctor to after continuously expressing that the vaccine is what made her sick. The parents were struggling to find a way to express their stories and to find data. Each night, new victims were appearing on the boards with no idea of what to do.

That is when we decided to created WWW.TRUTHABOUTGARDASIL.ORG. The board represents the TRUTH as we the parents of the victims of Gardasil see it. It is a central repository used to house the girls stories for view by others, has the latest news, and has a Guardian Angel page by location to give the parents contacts in their area who may be able to help them. It has videos, other site links, a forum so you can talk to other parents/victims, etc. It has made it easier for parents to quickly identify side effects, treatments that may have helped victims, etc. It takes about one year worth of research off the parents and allows them to quickly identify what occurred and what can be done to help the victims.”

Since her research began Rosemary says she has met thousands of girls who have been adversely affected by the Gardasil and the Cervarix vaccines.

I asked Leslie Botha how the FDA had become aware of the six women and had asked the group to do the presentation.

Leslie said that originally Karen Maynor had contacted the FDA after her daughter had died after she had the Gardasil vaccine. Her letter to Dr Margaret Hamberg MD contained many reports and details of young girls who have either died like her daughter Megan, or had become seriously ill.

The reports contained in her letter do not make comfortable reading. She wrote how one child ‘Samantha Hendrix’ who had once been described as a ‘walking encyclopaedia’ has been left with no concentration and failing her exams.

“Also In the case of young Samantha, she had a serious history of illnesses prior to vaccination, have you ever discovered if Merck carried out research on impaired immune responsiveness to establish if young girls with a medical history would be well enough to have this vaccine? In the case of Cervarix, GlaxoSmithKline did not carry out this research prior to the commencement of the vaccination programme in the United Kingdom. This young girl had many health problems before being vaccinated but now she is far worse off and what the future holds for her we just do not know. Perhaps, if more care and attention had been given by the pharmaceutical company in all of this, if they had taken more time to carry out the research into all aspects of safety and just had given it a few more years, exactly the same advice that Dr Harper gave to the UK regarding Cervarix, then perhaps these young ladies would not be so ill and I would not be writing to you today to ask for your help. With respect to Cervarix, many of the same “Gardasil” illnesses are occurring in the United Kingdom also so there appears to be a common thread that exists between these two HPV vaccines.”

She wrote.

She has a point, as on the Glaxo Smith Kline original GP advert it does state that ‘there are no data in the use of Cervarix in subjects with impaired immune responsiveness’.

Leslie said that the FDA do not just contact people but that they respond to letters. They contacted Karen and Karen knowing that she could not do what the FDA wanted alone asked the other women if they were prepared to help her.

Leslie says:-

“The first meeting conference call was in September/October with Cynthia, Freda, Rosemary and myself – where we expressed our concerns.

There was a second Webinar in November that the FDA presented for us on how their organization operates.

It was at this meeting that a third meeting was initiated – to be held at first before the holidays so that we could present research and data that backed up our concerns.

It was at this point that we asked Janny to join us since she spent so much time going through the VAERS reports.

By agreement, the meeting was pushed back until after the holidays – until the presentation.

We were in discussion many times about how to proceed – and found the people in the Patient Representative Program Office of Special Health Issues - to be open, and supportive as they shared the guidelines for the presentation.

The FDA has just initiated “listening sessions” and our group was one of the first to participate in them.

It has been an honor and a very positive experience from beginning to end.

We started out by gathering data, Rosemary, Freda and Janny did a fabulous job of creating and presenting graphs, and outlines of VAERs deaths.Freda was in contact with women in Spain, New Zealand and Australia as she gathered reports of adverse injuries from the girls in these countries.

Cynthia and I kept coming from different angles on what was causing the problem with this vaccine – mine was on menstrual cycle influence and she was focused on histamine and IgE.  We spent hours on the phone searching for studies.We would then do searches on histamine and IgE and the menstrual cycle and that is when we realized that our differing angles were beginning to blend into one perfect storm. It was the peer reviewed study that came out on the blind girl and HPV that nailed this for us – and we realized that we had discovered the REAL DANGERS with this vaccine.

We were shocked and awed that we had come across something no on had ever considered that founded both of our concerns.”

The conclusion slide 52 in the powerpoint shows exactly what was discovered and one has to agree the implications this has on many girls is quite shocking.

“During the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle, the production of estrogen releases histamine. During the luteal phase the protective effects of estradiol sharply decline, the production of progesterone increases and the immune system becomes more easily compromised; succumbing to the overdose of histamine from three sources: L-Histidine in the vaccine, increased amounts of estradiol in the body from natural production plus environmental toxins (estrogen mimickers) and the body’s own natural production of histamine. The rise and decline in hormones; the rise and decline in immunity and the overproduction of histamine – may be a factor as to why the health of the girls adversely affected by the HPV vaccines is not improving.

Both HPV vaccines are VLP’s (virus like particles). This can be termed ‘molecular mimicry’ and when an antigen in a vaccine is structurally similar to an antigen in the host antibodies are produced that react with the host’s normal tissue.

Allergy sufferers with moderate to severe asthma have IgE levels greater than 1,000 U/ml.

Normal serum IgE levels in individuals without allergies is less than 70 U/ml. An increase in IgE means more free IgE is available for binding to the activated mast cells. More mast cell activation and degranulation may lead to an increased release of inflammatory histamine. This reaction also leads to TH2 cytokine and leukotriene secretion, resulting in systemic anaphylaxis in the form of allergy.

This proves an increased risk of injury due to an overload of histamine being released from the mast cells causing a more severe inflammatory response throughout the body. Tissue damage due to this process can cause hypertrophy of smooth muscles. Smooth muscles are evident in the heart. With the rechallenge to an already active immune response we could have more smooth muscle damage especially to the heart and damage to the Central Nervous System.

With all our research completed, due to the lack of safety testing in regards to hormone, histamine and IgE level effects due to challenge and rechallenge on the female and male physiology the risks of the HPV vaccines outweigh the benefits.”

To learn exactly how this conclusion was reached read the full powerpoint presentation and documents

Freda Birrell another member of the group became involved in 2009, when her friend wrote to her asking for her help, saying that her daughter Bridget had become injured after the Gardasil vaccine.

Freda said that she asked me to find out if Cervarix was having the same effect on British girls as the Gardasil vaccine. After research I found that both vaccines were having serious adverse reactions.

Freda feels disillusioned with the British and Scottish Governments she said:-

“Both of the Health Ministers are too ready to come back with the usual information – any incidents which have occurred are either coincidental or part of population related illnesses.  At no time, to my knowledge or satisfaction, do they investigate any of these illnesses.  There are serious cases of arthralgia after vaccination with Cervarix and this condition has been researched and it is known that it is and can be vaccine related.  Sadly, our Ministers do not wish to recognise that fact.  There are many other serious illnesses which have occurred, eg a rare form of encephalitis, paralysis, blindness, seizures to name but a few. They are hiding their heads in the sand in the hope that it will all go away.  That will never happen where the lives of our young girls are involved.”

I asked Freda as she had studied both vaccines in detail if she felt that Cervarix was as dangerous as Gardasil. She said:-

“For the most part Cervarix elicits a much higher percentage of adverse events in the initial days after inoculation over Gardasil.  The comparison suggests that Cervarix is much less safe than Gardasil.  High percentages of fatigue, headache and myalgia may also be initially construed as the flu and not Cervarix related and therefore would not be reported as an adverse event related to the vaccination until the symtpoms persist past the one week time frame for the flu,  Gardasil has incurred many deaths.  Only one girl to our knowledge has died following a Cervarix vaccination and her case was attributed to her underlying illness, cancer.  She was undergoing tests apparently at the time.  Whilst we cannot say that Cervarix caused her death, the authorities likewise cannot say with 100% proof that it didnt.  What we can say with 200% certainty is she should not have been vaccinated whilst undergoing medical testing”

Also discovered by the group was the fact that neither vaccine worked if the girls already had an HPV infection.

Slide 15 states:-

“Conclusions: Evidence detailed here regarding the poor efficacy of both Gardasil and Cervarix on already infected women has to be investigated further. If this is occurring in established infected groups of women then what will be occurring in the bodies of adolescent girl’s who in many cases may already be sexually active and be infected at the time of vaccination? In the United States and United Kingdom, HPV SCREENING DOES NOT TAKE PLACE TO DETERMINE IF HPV INFECTION IS ALREADY PRESENT.”

The group had discovered that contrary to belief HPV is not only a STD but can be transmitted through other means. This was discussed on slide 9.

“The next series of slides will address whether HPV is transmitted solely via sexual contact”.

“Slide 9

In the first research paper there is growing evidence that HPV infection is acquired through non-sexual routes and that one potential route is mother-to-child transmission in the perinatal period; referenced as vertical transmission.

In the second paper, it was noted that HPV’s have been detected in virgins, infants/children, and juvenile Laryngeal papillomatosis was shown to be caused by these viruses. It has been acknowledged that HPVs may be transmitted by other non-sexual routes as well.”

Another very important point raised was the fact that over 250 girls who have had the vaccine have since had abnormal PAP Smear tests. This was thought to be because this group already had the HPV virus when they had the vaccine.

We now await the FDA’s verdict on the impressive array of documents and factual information that this group of so called ‘little women’ put before them. Will the FDA acknowledge that far from the wonder vaccines that Gardasil and Cervarix were supposed to be, these vaccines were more like poison darts thrown at girls in a crucial stages of their sexual development? These vaccines were given to young girls in many different stages of puberty and at many different stages of their menstrual cycles. We are now left wondering if the manufacturers Merck and Glaxo Smith Kline ever even considered this when developing these vaccines.

I will finish with a dedication to Megan from the very special mother Karen Maynor who wrote to the FDA and started this whole series of amazing events.

She writes:-

“Megan

As I stand here and watch as your brother receives his award for Academic Excellence I cannot help but think of you now and how proud I know you would have been. It was hard for him Megan as he hurts so much because you are not here. When we come together as a family for these occasions it never feels right. We miss you so…………………

We are working hard for you babe to get this information out there so others will know what can happen with this vaccine. Help others to become informed. To keep other moms and dads from having to feel this pain.

There are so many now that are fighting for ones just like you and for the many that are injured. You should see them, facing the GIANTS of the FDA and Big Pharma with no fear. They are strong because they have the truth. They never got to know you but they are fighting for you.

We love you and miss you……………………………………..”

Press Release

CONTACT: Wendy Zellner
PHONE: (412) 586-9777
E-MAIL: ZellnerWL@upmc.edu
Battelle, IBM, Merck Join UPMC’s Effort to Produce Vaccines to
Protect Public Health
21st Century Biodefense Offers Innovative Solution to President Obama’s Call for
Improved Response to Bioterrorism and Infectious Diseases

PITTSBURGH, March 11 – Building on its extensive efforts to establish a flexible vaccine development and production facility to strengthen the nation’s biosecurity, UPMC announced today that it has been joined by Battelle, IBM and Merck & Co. Inc. in this first-of-its-kind initiative. These industry and non-profit leaders are supporting UPMC and GE Healthcare in pursuing the construction of this facility, which UPMC proposes to operate in a unique partnership with the federal government.

“With this powerful coalition of partners, we will finally address a critical gap in the nation’s defenses against bioterrorism and infectious diseases,” said Robert J. Cindrich, UPMC’s chief legal counsel and chairman of the initiative, known as 21st Century Biodefense (21CB). “Through this collaboration, we are poised to deliver the urgently needed advances in vaccine development and manufacturing as recently called for by President Obama in his State of the Union address.”

Battelle, the world’s largest, independent research and development organization, has agreed to provide comprehensive pre-clinical research and development services, including infectious disease model development and product safety and efficacy evaluations in a Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) environment. These services will support the licensure of new vaccines and therapeutics by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Battelle also will provide project management support and senior leadership to 21CB’s advisory board. “We are committed to solving the most critical problems in human health and stand ready to be a full partner in this impressive public-private initiative,” said John Wade, vice president for Battelle.

IBM will provide innovative information technology, such as IBM’s new POWER7 systems, to create the infrastructure that will support 21CB manufacturing processes and operations. This infrastructure will be able to handle extreme volumes of data and scale quickly to adapt to changing demand. “IBM brings leading technology to 21CB, as well as access to teams of life sciences researchers at each of our eight research labs around the world,” said Dan Pelino, general manager, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences. “We’re pleased to bring our deep skills and pharmaceutical industry consulting expertise to support 21CB and its important mission.”

Merck, a global pharmaceutical company, has agreed to provide drug-development and bioprocess counsel as part of a planned consortium of other biopharmaceutical companies. Merck also will provide senior leadership to 21CB’s advisory board and training for facility staff when 21CB begins operations. “As a global company with a long history of dedication to public health, Merck is pleased to share its technical expertise with 21CB in this innovative approach to enhancing our nation’s biodefense capabilities,” said Diana Lanchoney, executive director, Merck Research Laboratories. These new 21CB partners join GE Healthcare, which announced in October 2009 that it would provide manufacturing design and development expertise, as well as production equipment, consumables, and manufacturing processes for 21CB. GE Healthcare’s leadership in bioprocessing and its innovative disposable manufacturing technologies will enable 21CB to rapidly and flexibly produce vaccines for the U.S. government’s dynamic biosecurity needs. The new facility would be designed to produce multiple vaccines simultaneously and would have the ability to quickly switch production from one vaccine to another to respond in a crisis.

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 27, President Obama announced a new initiative to respond faster and more effectively to bioterrorism and infectious diseases. The Administration said it plans to pursue “a business model that leverages market forces and reduces risk to attract pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry collaboration with the U.S. government.” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has launched a comprehensive review of the nation’s public health countermeasure enterprise with the goal of providing “a modernized countermeasure production process where we have more promising discoveries, more advanced development, more robust manufacturing, better stockpiling, and more advanced distribution practices. In other words, we want to create a system that can respond to any threat at any time.”

With the expectation that the government will allocate money for this public health priority, UPMC and its partners plan to compete for the funds to build a vaccine facility. Through 21CB, UPMC would share in the necessary private funding and own and operate the facility under the direction of the federal government as a public-private partnership, thus ensuring that the plant focuses on national health priorities. The initiative would create 1,000 jobs directly and up to 6,000 indirectly, while increasing the nation’s pool of scientists and engineers.
# # #
About 21st Century Biodefense (21CB) 21CB is a non-profit corporation established by UPMC in 2009 to build, own and operate a facility for the development and manufacture of biologic drugs and vaccines to protect against bioterrorism and certain naturally occurring disease threats. The targeted drugs and vaccines have limited commercial markets, thus spawning the need for this new and innovative solution. 21CB has created a coalition of private interests to work with the U.S. government in helping it meet its responsibilities in the area of biodefense. 21CB would act in a public-private partnership with the U.S. government to bring to bear the expertise and resources necessary to meet the nation’s pressing need for medical countermeasures and therapeutics to combat bioterrorism, while fortifying and expanding the nation’s bio-industrial base.

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Seeing POD People? It’s No Sci-Fi Film

By ARIEL KAMINER
NYTimes
3/1/10

PODs are the sleeper cells of public health, assuming a different shape and observing different local mores each time a crisis emerges. When hepatitis A was diagnosed in a bartender at the Manhattan nightclub Socialista two years ago, POD people were on hand to vaccinate patrons, including some guests at Ashton Kutcher’s birthday party. In the case of a bioterrorism attack, they might turn up in your neighborhood dispensing anthrax antidote. On Feb. 18, they were in Anshe Sfard Hall in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, rolling up the sleeves of Hasidic Jews. That’s a long way from Ashton Kutcher.

I entered the hall on the left, with the other women; men entered on the right. With stacks of gold-braided chairs in the corner and a divider to keep the sexes apart, the Anshe Sfard POD — short for Point of Distribution — could have been the day-before photo of an Orthodox wedding. Instead, it was the front line against one of the city’s more surprising outbreaks in years.

It started last year, when some children at a Jewish summer camp in the Catskills came down with mumps, one of those childhood diseases that were supposed to have been consigned to history. They brought it back home to the Hasidic enclaves in Borough Park, Crown Heights and Williamsburg. By last month, there were more than 900 cases, and more adults were getting sick.

Time to activate the PODs.

Mumps is not generally fatal, though it is painful and can cause deafness or infertility. In neighborhoods where families might have a dozen children, and young men spend long days together in yeshivas or synagogues, it spreads fast. But business was slow at Anshe Sfard, so Sheila Palevsky and Elissa Levine, two of the sharp, funny members of the POD team, were keeping each other amused with tales of former postings.

Hasidic Jews may be more inclined to visit their own doctors than to discuss bodily functions with strangers. (“When did you last go to the mikvah?” Ms. Levine asked while taking my medical history, referring to the ritual bath that many observant Jewish women visit after menstruating. I thought the euphemism was very sweet.) As for the antivaccine movement, its echoes are rare in these parts, but they ring out with a strong local accent. “Jews trust the Almighty, not vaccines,” one commenter wrote on the site of The Yeshiva World, an online newspaper, in a mix of Hebrew and English. On a Crown Heights Web site, someone else wrote, “I wish that folks would have as much faith and confidence in God as they do in doctors and scientists.”

But there is another reason things look different here: This outbreak has written a new chapter in epidemiological history.

The standard prescription is two doses of the M.M.R. (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine in childhood. That’s what most of the patients in Brooklyn had gotten, and it didn’t help them. Which has led medical professionals to reconsider some long-held notions about mumps in particular and communicable diseases in general.

“People that have measurable antibodies to mumps, which I was always taught meant you were immune, we found are getting the disease,” said Dr. Edward Chapnick, director of infectious diseases at Maimonides Medical Center. “And two vaccines, which we always thought had a very high effectiveness at preventing this, turns out to have a 75 to 80 percent effectiveness.”

The Department of Health still recommends two shots, but many doctors in the area — including Dr. Eli Rosen, a pediatrician who said he had treated 200 to 300 mumps cases so far — now favor three vaccinations, as do other private doctors in the area. “It appears that two vaccines are not effective in the vast majority of cases,” Dr. Rosen said. “Is this going to be a pattern we’ll see as we go out in vaccine years?” And, he added, would other vaccines also lose their effectiveness over time?

As a child I probably got my two M.M.R. shots, but who remembers. Everyone I spoke to assured me that so long as I wasn’t pregnant and did not have an immune disorder, there was no downside to an extra shot. But what’s the chance I would really need it? I don’t hang out in Brooklyn yeshivas.

In a city where people live so close to one another, it’s baffling that an outbreak could stay confined to a specific population, even an insular population. But that’s the paradox of city life, on an epidemiological scale: We are simultaneously a teeming megalopolis and a collection of little villages (or offices or apartment buildings), each with its own public health profile.

Still, a cluster of cases has already been documented in Orthodox and Hasidic neighborhoods of Westchester County. Unless that outbreak is halted, entropy will eventually win out.

So at the Quality Health Center in Williamsburg, which has reported hundreds of suspected cases, I decided to roll my sleeve up. Turns out it’s not just a fear of needles that makes little kids cry; the shot really did smart.

To distract me, Dov Landa, a physician assistant, shared the story of a 40-year-old Hasidic woman who had brought her large family in the day before. When it was her turn to get vaccinated, Mr. Landa, following protocol, asked if she was pregnant. The woman laughed. “I haven’t been pregnant in 10 years,” she said. He tested her anyway, just to be sure. And so it was that he got to tell her the happy news. Mazel tov.