Vaccine Science's Conflicts of Interest

[Guest guest]

Vaccine Science's Conflicts of

Interesthttp://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15005Doug Collins, Washington

Free Press

January 23, 2003Viewed on January 23, 2003

 

Overtreatment in the medical establishment is a well-known fact. For example,

individual doctors have a tendency to overprescribe even sensitive treatments

like surgery if they are rewarded for this by the insurance system they work

under. That’s exactly why HMOs or " managed care " facilities succeed in

containing healthcare costs: they remove the profit motive from the doctor.

 

Vaccines, like surgery, are a sensitive health practice, so at first it’s a

little hard to imagine that anyone would have a motive to exaggerate their

benefits and suppress information about their harmful effects. But vaccine

manufacturers are private companies and private companies always have a profit

motive. Although many companies may take part in activities that benefit the

public (and vaccines do certainly have some public benefit), companies also have

a clear goal of making money. In large-scale public healthcare, this can also

result in overtreatment, such as the overuse of vaccines.

 

In the year 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government

Reform held hearings to examine conflicts of interest in the two official panels

that control vaccine policy in the U.S. (there is one panel at the Centers for

Disease Control and one at the FDA). Among the committee’s findings were

widespread conflicts of interest among panel members in the form of financial

ties to pharmaceutical companies who manufacture vaccines that the panels

oversee. Following is a summary of the committee findings, assembled by Dr

Joseph Mercola.

 

 

The CDC routinely grants waivers from conflict of interest rules to every

member of its advisory committee.

 

 

 

CDC advisory committee members who are not allowed to vote on certain

recommendations due to financial conflicts of interest are allowed to actively

participate in committee deliberations and advocate specific positions.

 

 

 

The chairman of the CDC’s advisory committee until recently owned 600 shares

of stock in Merck, a pharmaceutical company with an active vaccine division.

 

 

 

Members of the CDC’s advisory committee often leave key details out of their

financial disclosure statements, and are not required to provide the missing

information by CDC ethics officials.

 

 

 

Three out of the five FDA advisory committee members who voted to approve the

rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to the pharmaceutical

companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine. The vaccine

was recalled a few years later after numerous public complaints of serious bowel

obstruction due to the vaccine.

 

 

 

Four out of the eight CDC advisory committee members who voted to approve

guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had similar financial ties.

 

 

In addition to conflicts of interest in advisory panels, there are similar

concerns about lack of impartiality in vaccine research. Because of the scarcity

of public funding for vaccine research, most research is funded by the same

companies which make the vaccines—and which are obviously hoping for optimistic

results. Recently, two researchers, Professor David Elliman and Dr. Helen

Bedford published a study in the Lancet demonstrating the safety of the

measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) combined vaccine. The two came under public

criticism when it was soon discovered that they had both received money on a

number of occasions from the vaccine manufacturer. Elliman is quoted, " If one

were to cut off the money from the pharmaceutical industry we could all go

home. " (reported in Scotland on Sunday by Camillo Fracassini.) Vaccine critics

for their part can cite other studies which have pointed to links between the

MMR shot and a variety of other conditions, especially autism and Crohn’s

disease of the bowel.

 

Researchers who persist in probing vaccine safety can see their funding dry up.

Dr. John Martin, a pioneer investigator into the transmission of stealth viruses

from monkeys to humans, lost his funding when he continued to research the

relationship of vaccines to such viral transmission. Other researchers have

simply lost their jobs.

 

Although many vaccine studies are currently performed, most of the studies are

designed in a way that will never detect many types of potential damage. In

fact, the federal Institute of Medicine’s protocol for verifying causality of

vaccine damage consists of comparing health problems of recently vaccinated

children to health problems in background control groups of already vaccinated

children (not comparisons to unvaccinated subjects). Because the test group and

the control group are both vaccinated, such tests will show only immediate

effects of the vaccination, and are of course unable to detect any long-term or

widespread damage in the vaccinated population, because any such damage would

become a " normal " background parameter of the control group. The pharmaceutical

companies have followed suit in their " safety studies " of vaccines. Try finding

a single manufacturer data sheet for any vaccine that cites a safety study

ranging for more than a week or two after vaccination, and a control group of

unvaccinated subjects. None do. Most only test for adverse reactions in a period

of two or three days after the vaccination. Crazy? You bet it is!

 

In order to have assurance of better public health, we need better research,

research without a profit motive attached. Instead of the typical short-term

studies that the manufacturers perform, we need the following:

 

 

Long term studies of vaccines, using non-vaccinated control groups, assessing

the statistical correlation with chronic diseases such as autism, childhood

diabetes, Crohn’s disease, attention deficit disorder, and childhood arthritis.

Before-and-after studies that test children prior to and after immunization,

to better assess the impact on the body.

Studies that are conducted by researchers who do not receive monetary support

from the companies that produce the vaccines.

 

 

One might think such studies would be a no-brainer for our public health

officials, but when public interest is pitted against big pharmaceutical

dollars, achieving sensible research will take a lot of effort by concerned

parents and doctors.

 

Doug Collins is a co-editor of the Washington Free Press in Seattle.

 

 

 

 

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