ME is a provocation disease. That is, a range of co-factors a virus, a viral and a bacterial infection, stress, surgery, vaccination, inherited allergies, toxic chemicals can make a personal susceptible to the virus that appears to cause ME (See Loria, RM, Coxsackieviruses: A General Update, Plenum, 1988).

Vaccines are themselves an onslaught on the immune system. After you are vaccinated your immune system is otherwise engaged; and during this "window of vulnerability" other infections (such as viral ones) can lead to ME, a latent infection turns into acute attack or relapses from earlier infections can occur. We know, for instance, that cell-mediated immunity that is, your immune system's response in your cells is depressed up to six weeks after measles vaccine (ABPI Data Sheet Compendium 1994/5).According to Sir Graham S Wilson, honorary lecturer at the Department of Bacteriology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, many different types of vaccine can precipitate polio (GS Wilson, The Hazards of Immunization, 1967:265-80).

Vaccines themselves can cause "provocation polio". HV Wyatt was one of the first to observe what medicine now widely accepts: that multiple injections of vaccines or any other drugs can lead to "provocation" polio (see WDDTY vol 5 no 10).

Vaccines themselves do not give the patients polio. But muscle damage caused by the needle can allow polio vaccines to track up the nerves. This recently occurred in Russia, where children are commonly given injections of antibiotics. This provoked polio strains from vaccines to spread from the damaged muscle to the spinal cord, causing paralytic polio.

The weakened live viruses in vaccines can themselves mutate, causing new disease in the population. One group of researchers found that one so-called wild circulating enterovirus most closely resembled the polio vaccine virus (Brit Med Bull 1991;47:4:793-808). ME patients have also been found to be infected with mutant or defective viruses (Jnl Gen Virol 1990; 71: 1399-402).