Health Impact News Editor Comments
Bloomberg announced this week that Merck’s MMR vaccine sales more than quadrupled after the California Disney measles outbreak.
There’s nothing like an outbreak to get parents to vaccinate — or to help vaccine sales.
As a measles outbreak that started in California grew from seven cases on Jan. 7 to more than 100 a month later, sales of Merck & Co.’s measles vaccine surged as well.
From the first week the measles outbreak was in the news to a month later when cases neared their peak, the use of Merck’s M-M-R II vaccine more than quadruped to more than 4,000 a week, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Merck reported first-quarter results today showing that sales of the measles vaccine and two other inoculations grew 24 percent from the same time a year before, to $348 million. The extra sales helped the Kenilworth, New Jersey, drugmaker beat analysts’ profit estimates. (Source.)
MMR Vaccine Lawsuit for Fraud Still Pending
Of course, there is no single measles vaccine currently on the market, and one has to purchase the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine which is a 3 in 1 combo vaccine. Merck has been involved in a long federal lawsuit with allegations of fraud over the mumps portion of the MMR vaccine, in a case filed back in 2010 by two whistleblowers, virologists who worked for Merck. Merck has apparently tried hard to get this case thrown out of court, and keep this news out of the media, but late in 2014 a federal judge finally ruled that the case is to move forward.
We had to obtain this news from legal websites (such as this one) providing news to attorneys, as we could find no mention of it in the mainstream news. The memorandum issued by judge in district court explaining his ruling is found here.
Since this case has been languishing in the courts for going on 5 years now, there are older reports in both the mainstream and alternative media that exist. Here is a report Forbes wrote on it back in 2012. Some quotes:
Anyone who falls on either side of the debate about vaccines’ alleged potential to cause harm is sure to have heard the big news this week — the unsealing of a whistleblower suit against Merck, filed back in 2010 by two former employees accusing the drugmaker of overstating the effectiveness of its mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine.
The scientists claim Merck defrauded the U.S. government by causing it to purchase an estimated four million doses of mislabeled and misbranded MMR vaccine per year for at least a decade, and helped ignite two recent mumps outbreaks that the allegedly ineffective vaccine was intended to prevent in the first place.
“As the single largest purchaser of childhood vaccines (accounting for more than 50 percent of all vaccine purchasers), the United States is by far the largest financial victim of Merck’s fraud. But the ultimate victims here are the millions of children who every year are being injected with a mumps vaccine that is not providing them with an adequate level of protection against mumps. And while this is a disease the CDC targeted to eradicate by now, the failure in Merck’s vaccine has allowed this disease to linger with significant outbreaks continuing to occur,” the suit alleges. (Source – emphasis added.)
The Wall Street Journal also covered the story back in 2012, but according to a report by Dr. Mercola, the Wall Street Journal’s “elite” network of CFOs from the world’s top corporations met 3 days later (including executives from Merck), and the story was removed from their website.
Here is some more information about the lawsuit provided by the Courthouse News Service back in 2012:
Merck is the only manufacturer licensed by the FDA to sell the mumps vaccine in United States, and if it could not show that the vaccine was 95 percent effective, it risked losing its lucrative monopoly, according to the complaint.
That’s why Merck found it critically important to keep claiming such a high efficacy rate, the complaint states.
And, Chatom claims, that’s why Merck went to great lengths, including “manipulating its test procedures and falsifying the test results,” to prop up the bogus figure, though it knew that the attenuated virus from which it created the vaccine had been altered over the years during the manufacturing process, and that the quality of the vaccine had degraded as a result.
Starting in the late 1990s, Merck set out on its sham testing program with the objective of “report[ing] efficacy of 95 percent or higher regardless of the vaccine’s true efficacy,” the complaint states.
Chatom says Merck initially called its testing program Protocol 007.
Under Protocol 007, Merck did not test the vaccine’s ability to protect children against a “wild-type” mumps virus, which is “the type of real-life virus against which vaccines are generally tested,” the complaint states.
Instead, Chatom says, Merck tested children’s blood using its own attenuated strain of the virus.
“This was the same mumps strain with which the children were vaccinated,” the complaint states.
That “subverted” the purpose of the testing regime, “which was to measure the vaccine’s ability to provide protection against a disease-causing mumps virus that a child would actually face in real life. The end result of this deviation … was that Merck’s test overstated the vaccine’s effectiveness,” Chatom claims.
Merck also added animal antibodies to blood samples to achieve more favorable test results, though it knew that the human immune system would never produce such antibodies, and that the antibodies created a laboratory testing scenario that “did not in any way correspond to, correlate with, or represent real life … virus neutralization in vaccinated people,” according to the complaint.
Chatom claims that the falsification of test results occurred “with the knowledge, authority and approval of Merck’s senior management.” (Source.)
Does the MMR Vaccine Kill More People than Measles?
The CDC has stated that there have been no deaths related to measles in over 10 years. However, the U.S. Government keeps a database of reports called The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The database is available to the public, and there is a search portal the public can use at Medalerts.org. A search for the MMR and other older measles vaccines no longer available reveals that 108 reports of deaths associated with the MMR and measles vaccine have been reported during the past 10 years. (Read more info here.)
Measles Outbreaks Good for Vaccine Business
As Merck’s first quarter sales show, measles outbreaks are good for business. How can it not be good, when they are able to give a unified message to the public via the compliant mainstream media that such outbreaks are due to children who are not vaccinated. This message is then used to propose new legislation across the U.S. to increase the vaccination rates and remove exemptions, making vaccines mandatory.
What the mainstream media is not reporting or highlighting, is that the majority of people who were infected with measles in the recent Disney outbreak were in fact already vaccinated. Reports show that between 50% and 86% of those who came down with measles in the Disney outbreak were vaccinated. But that does not stop health authorities from blaming the unvaccinated anyway.
So not only is the MMR vaccine broiled in a legal battle over fraud, it is not very effective either. None of that matters to Merck, obviously, as sales on the vaccine soar.
Comment on this story at VaccineImpact.com
