Because it is being recommended for all women during pregnancy, you might think that the Tdap vaccine for whooping cough has been well-studied in pregnant women. You would be wrong.

In fact, the package insert with Tdap vaccine (Adacel) states that the “. . . safety and effectiveness of Adacel vaccine have not been established in pregnant women.”

The insert also claims that “Animal reproduction studies have not been conducted with Adacel vaccine. It is not known whether Adacel vaccine can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman or can affect reproduction capacity.”

The exact same verbiage can be found in another pertussis vaccine called Daptocel (DTaP).

I’m not making this stuff up. The CDC recommends every pregnant woman receive an immunization against pertussis, yet there are zero studies showing it is safe for them.

Beyond that, one of the main questions is why have pertussis infections gone up for infants when nationally, nearly 95 percent of children are vaccinated?

The problem is the vaccine’s poor efficacy — it simply does not work well or provide long-term immunity.

Remember, one major factor in the vaccine’s failure is that pertussis bacteria have mutated away from the strain used to create it.

That means that the CDC is recommending a vaccine that is outdated.

Common sense dictates that giving more of this ineffective vaccine to children and adults is not the answer.

In 2013, a New England Journal of Medicine article noted that a new strain of pertussis was infecting Americans.

This new strain lacked a protein called pertactin, which is used in the Tdap vaccine to stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies.

Pertactin is found in the old strain of pertussis.

The NEJM study found that there is a greater likelihood of whooping cough being caused by pertactin-deficient pertussis in vaccinated people than the disease being caused by pertactin-producing pertussis.

Which actually means that vaccinating with Tdap makes a person more susceptible to this new strain of pertussis.