Government Watchdog and Public Interest Groups to CDC: Stop Falsely Claiming Not to Accept Corporate Money

Public health, government watchdog and public interest groups today petitioned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cease making false disclaimers that it “does not accept commercial support” and has “no financial interests or other relationships with the manufacturers of commercial products.” The CDC makes such disclaimers hundreds of times in its publications and on its website, despite that the National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has accepted for it nearly $80 million from drug companies and other commercial manufacturers during fiscal years 2014-2018. The petition states: “These claims may be comforting to consumers and health professionals, but both are indisputably false.” Groups endorsing the petition include Knowledge Ecology International, Liberty Coalition, Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen and U.S. Right to Know. “It’s time for the CDC to be truthful with health professionals and all Americans, and to stop denying that it takes corporate money,” said Gary Ruskin, co-director of U.S. Right to Know. “The CDC is violating the public trust by misleading us in this way.”

Fully Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated — A Summary of the Research

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has repeatedly asked CDC to create studies which explain, “How do child health outcomes compare between fully vaccinated and unvaccinated children?” During a November 2012 Congressional hearing on autism before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Dr. Coleen Boyle, the Director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, gave evasive answers to lawmakers pressing her on this point. After considerable badgering, she finally stated, “We have not studied vaccinated versus unvaccinated [children].” That was perjury. Boyle knew that CDC had commissioned an in-house researcher, Thomas Verstraeten to perform vaccinated/unvaccinated study on CDC’s giant Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) in 1999 (I summarize Verstraeten’s secret findings on slide 2). Verstraeten found a dramatic link between mercury-containing hepatitis B vaccines and several neurological injuries including autism and prepared the study for publication. CDC shared Verstraeten’s analysis with the then four vaccine makers but kept it secret from the American public.

Fully Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Children Studies: The Big CDC Cover-up Linking Vaccines to Autism

The data in CDC’s 1999 Verstraeten study clearly inculpated thimerosal as the principle culprit behind the autism epidemic. Contemporary emails among CDC officials— obtained under the FOIA— and the transcripts from a secret 2000 meeting between government regulators and vaccine makers at Simpsonwood, Georgia, show HHS officials plotting to create phony studies to exonerate vaccines. CDC officials hired a Scandanavian, Poul Thorsen, giving him $10 million to create a series of fraudulent reports from Denmark. Thorsen dutifully produced the predetermined results but allegedly stole at least $1 million of the grant from CDC. He is now an international fugitive under Federal indictment and on HHS’s “Most Wanted” list. CDC continues to cite Thorsen’s studies as the bedrock for its claim that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Government Health Agencies Take Huge Profits from Vaccine Royalties – Gardasil the Top One

The CDC is a major player in the vaccine marketplace, buying half of all childhood vaccines in the U.S. and then selling them to contracted public health agencies through the Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program, which pushes free and low-cost vaccines on indigent children. Over the past three decades, the CDC’s vaccine purchases have increased 15-fold as the average cost of fully vaccinating a child to age 18 rose from $100 to $2192—while vaccine companies have raked in the profits. The agency’s involvement with vaccine manufacturers also extends to patents, licensing agreements and collaboration on projects to develop new vaccines. In fact, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) profit handsomely from their ownership or co-ownership with private sector partners of vaccine-related patents. Some of the key technologies underlying the development of the HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix emerged from research patented by the NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI), which then licensed the technology to Merck, MedImmune and GlaxoSmithKline. By 2009, HPV licensing had become NIH’s top generator of royalty revenues. Gardasil is “perhaps the leading example of a new form of unconstrained government self-dealing, in arrangements whereby [HHS] can transfer technology to pharmaceutical partners, [and] simultaneously both approve and protect their partners’ technology licenses while also taking a cut of the profits.” It seems doubtful that agencies can remain impartial in the face of these profits.

The Historical Facts on Measles and the Measles Vaccine Censored by Mainstream Media

This year, the fear mongering about measles has reached epidemic proportions in America. A day doesn’t go by without media outlets publishing angry articles and editorials spewing hatred toward a tiny minority of parents with unvaccinated children, who are being blamed for measles outbreaks. The remedy is always a call to track down, persecute and punish any parent whose child is not vaccinated. While most of the public conversation in the past two decades has been focused on children, who have suffered convulsions, encephalitis and encephalopathy after MMR vaccine reactions and become chronically ill and disabled, there hasn’t been much discussion about measles vaccine effectiveness or what measles was like before and after the vaccine was licensed in the mid-20th century. This is a special report on measles vaccine failures based on evidence published in the scientific and medical literature that is not being discussed in public conversations about measles vaccine policies and mandatory vaccination laws. When vaccine policy and law precedes the science, we all pay the price. People should not be forced to use vaccines that not only cause harm but also, clearly, fail to work as advertised.

Will New FDA Approval of Gardasil Vaccine for Adults Lead to Mandatory Gardasil Vaccination?

After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approved Merck’s HPV-9 Gardasil vaccine for use in adults age 27 to 45 in 2018, the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is evaluating whether to expand their current HPV vaccine recommendation to include this new age group. ACIP’s current recommendation is that boys and girls ages 9 through 15 should get two-doses of HPV-9. The “catch-up” vaccine schedule is a three- dose series for females above age 15 through age 27 and males above 15 years of age to 21 years of age, if not previously vaccinated with HPV vaccine. Should ACIP expand their recommendations for use of HPV-9 vaccine in the newly approved age group, the CDC won’t be alone in the push to increase the use of the HPV vaccine by children and adults in the U.S. During the September meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC), a federal advisory committee that makes recommendations to the National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO), the HHS Assistant Secretary ADM Brett Giroir M.D. emphasized that HHS supported the NVAC’s HPV vaccine recommendations published in June 2018. Dr. Giroir stated that increasing HPV vaccination in America would be a focus for HHS in 2019. The federal government’s focus on increasing the use recommendations for the HPV vaccine may result in a renewed effort by state legislators to introduce legislation in many states to mandate HPV vaccine for school entry.

How the Coca-Cola Company Influences the CDC to Conceal Health Dangers of Refined Sugars

Questions and suspicions have been raised in recent years about apparent collusion by the CDC and the Coca-Cola corporation, which would allow the marketing of their soft drinks while suppressing information linking those soft drinks to health problems such as diabetes and obesity. These questions and suspicions were pursued by a study published in the Milbank Quarterly January 2019. Its title is Public Meets Private: Conversations Between Coca-Cola and the CDC. Public health agency collusion that potentially benefits a producer of harmful foods or beverages is no small issue. The “conversations” in the title of the study were emails the authors were able to obtain. The Milbank Quarterly researchers considered this study relevant due to recently reported episodes of top CDC officials entertaining relationships with Coca- Cola executives. The concern is that makers of unhealthy food products are having inappropriate influences on the CDC. For example, one of the reported episodes that motivated this study was: "In 2016, Barbara Bowman, director of the CDC’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, resigned after emails between her and a former Coca-Cola executive were disclosed. [The emails] showed that Bowman had advised the former Coca-Cola and industry association executive on how to influence the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) to stop promoting taxes on sugar."

CDC Lists Top Gardasil Vaccine “Champion” Doctors and Clinics in the U.S. Giving the Most HPV Vaccines

As we reported at the end of last month (December 2018), our #1 topic on Health Impact News in terms of readership is the Gardasil vaccine scandal, which you will almost never read about in the U.S. corporate-sponsored "mainstream" media. Our top 2 stories in 2018 were about the Gardasil vaccine, and we published many other articles about Merck's HPV vaccine Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine licensed for sale in the U.S., including news reports about how they are expanding their market by going into China, and obtaining FDA approval to expand the vaccine to older adults. These efforts are netting billions of dollars in new wealth for Merck. And Merck is apparently not expanding their market alone. They are doing it with help from the U.S. government, which also owns patents and earns revenue from the sale of the vaccine. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just recently promoted the top doctors and clinics in the U.S. giving out the most Gardasil vaccines as "Champions" on their government-funded website. Since Gardasil is the #1 topic Health Impact News readers are concerned about, we figured you would be interested in knowing who these top doctors and clinics are in the U.S. giving out the most Gardasil vaccines, and we have republished the list of "Champions" in this article.

National Vaccine Laws Routinely Ignored by Health Officials and Doctors Regarding Patient Information on Vaccine Risks

In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), a carefully crafted piece of legislation that gave vaccine manufacturers their dream come true: blanket immunity from liability for injuries resulting from childhood vaccines. Throwing a bone to the safety concerns of consumers, the Act also mandated that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (via the CDC) develop and distribute educational materials to inform vaccine recipients and/or their parents about a given vaccine’s risks and benefits. The NCVIA stipulated that doctors give out the appropriate materials—currently called Vaccine Information Statements (VISs)—“prior to every dose of specific vaccines,” including before “each dose of a multi-dose series.” Early on, government documentation emphasized the importance of giving VISs every time a vaccine is administered because “the health status of the child could have changed”—and as an example of changes in health status, the CDC cited children with “evolving neurological disorder[s].” By 2005, however, researchers were calling attention to doctors’ frequent failure to give out VISs, while also noting that the physicians who did distribute VISs “rarely initiated discussions regarding contraindications to immunizations.” To rectify the situation, the same authors carried out a CDC-coordinated evaluation in 2007 and proposed revisions “that would alert the physician to the need to use the VIS.” Neither the CDC nor state-level officials endorsed the proposed revisions. What appears to matter most to the CDC is that health care providers use “every opportunity to administer appropriate vaccines,” and informing patients about the potential risks to receiving vaccines is counter productive to that goal.

CDC’s Own Data Support Link Between MMR Vaccine and Autism

After four long years, Dr. Brian Hooker’s reanalysis of the CDC’s MMR-autism data from the original Destefano et al. 2004 Pediatrics paper has been republished in the Winter 2018 Edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. The data, when properly analyzed, using the CDC’s own study protocol, show a strong, statistically significant relationship between the timing of the first MMR vaccine and autism, specifically in African American males. In addition, a relationship also exists in the timing of the MMR vaccine and those individuals who were diagnosed with autism without mental retardation. These relationships call into question the conclusion of the original Destefano et al. 2004 paper which dismissed a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.