Vaccines, thimerosal and industry

[Guest guest]

http://www.nosenada.org/cblog/

 

Sunday, June 19. 2005

Vaccines, thimerosal and industry

Great investigative piece in salon.com by Robert Kennedy Jr. on

politics and science in vaccines. (I originally heard about the story

on Chris Mooney's site. He provides links (like this one) to

questions

about media quashing of the story, but I will not further comment on

that here.)

 

Having a daughter due in about a month (our first), I have been doing

extensive reading on vaccines, trying to get a balanced picture of the

situation. Unfortunately the strongest conclusion I can come to is

that RFK Jr.'s story is right on. There are enough words out there

already about vaccines so I won't summarize here. But I do have two

thoughts that I haven't seen elsewhere:

 

1: The salon.com story is as sobering as it is completely

unsurprising, but it concerns only one aspect of the vaccines debate.

Thimerosal is not a tempest in a teapot because it is not an essential

ingredient to vaccines in general (there are already vaccines

available that do not contain thimerosal). Vaccine makers will be able

to easily deflect public criticism about the future of the vaccine

supply because they will claim that thimerosal was the only culprit

worth worry. They will have to face lawsuits, but the lawsuits will be

about the past, not the future.

 

The larger, more latent issue in this story is the behavior of the

vaccine manufactures and CDC/FDA officials and how both groups have

now lost all credibility when it comes to assuring parents like me

that vaccines are safe. Both groups will strenuously claim over the

next few years that mercury-free vaccines are absolutely safe. And

when anecdotal reports and then data emerge that say otherwise, both

groups will act in precisely the same way highlighted in the salon.com

article. Unless mandated otherwise by Congress (and backed up with

repeated hearings in both the authorization and CDC/FDA appropriation

committees), their immediate reaction will be to protect the interests

of the vaccine manufactures, their second reaction will be to protect

public health (even if they have no data that says particular vaccines

do so), and protection of individual children will be a distant third

priority.

 

Even without the blatant conflict of interest throughout the

vaccination approval and recommendation system, the future is clear

from the outset because CDC's vaccination schedule does not pass the

most basic common sense test. CDC recommends that infants receive a

Hepatitis-B vaccination within 24 - 48 hours of birth. I don't care if

they study this issue for 100 years and find that a vast majority of

infants have no detectable side effects from the Hep-B shot,

introducing a foreign organism and mercury into a completely

undeveloped immune system is strike one (they recently recommended a

Hg-free Hep-B shot, but it is much more expensive and so the CDC still

recommends the Hg-laden shot if the Hg-free shot is " unavailable " ).

Immunizing broadly and indiscriminately regardless of the mother's

Hep-B status, which is the only reasonable way an infant can get

Hep-B, is strike two. (By reasonable I mean to imply that an infant

could be exposed if an infected IV drug user pricked the infant, but

how reasonable of a risk is that?) That the CDC decided to implement

universal Hep-B vaccination of newborns only because it was

unsuccessful in targeting the community that is actually at risk of

contracting Hep-B (same group as is high risk for HIV), is strike

three. In other words, the fact that CDC even recommends Hep-B

vaccinations for newborns destroys their credibility for me.

 

2: Scientists eschew anecdotal information with very good reason:

Statistics can be made to say anything, but solidly- and

transparently-collected and analyzed data provides the best departure

point for intellectual discussions about the meaning of natural

phenomena. So medical researchers (or just the vaccine manufacturing

industry and CDC and FDA officials?) have been using the anecdotal

nature of parents' reports of the vaccination-autism link as

justification for downplaying the reports. However, at a certain

point, somebody has to notice the sheer number of autism cases and the

number of parents who link definitive day-and-night changes in the

behavior of their children to the shots their children received.

Dismissing a broad litany of anecdotal cases simply because they are

anecdotal and have not yet been subjected to the rigors of JAMA or

Nature review again does not pass the common sense test. Thousands of

parents coming together to act and litigate does not happen

spontaneously. The fact that Senate Majority Leader Frist is working

silently to quash lawsuits brought by these parents is indicative of

how close they are to the truth. (How so very laissze-faire Republican

of you, Dr. Frist. I guess your oath is 'first, do no harm to the

pharma industry.')

 

Beyond what I write about in the two points above, another thought

about conflict of interest and public health. This is the most telling

paragraph of the story:

 

" [Dr. Paul] Offit [one of CDC's top vaccine advisors], who shares a

patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he 'would make

money' if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he

dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in

CDC approval might bias his judgment. 'It provides no conflict for

me,' he insists. 'I have simply been informed by the process, not

corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was

trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in

this country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health

people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions

that they know are unsafe for children. It's just not the way it

works.' "

 

Yes, my friend, that is exactly the way it works. Conflict of interest

laws exist precisely because people like you think that way. In other

words, you are not allowed to decide the merits of your own conflict

of interest because you are not a disinterested, objective observer!

Isn't this obvious?

 

And by the way:

 

" Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances.

Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of

children's health, proud of their 'partnerships' with pharmaceutical

companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by

irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering

children's health. They are often resentful of questioning. 'Science,'

says Offit, 'is best left to scientists.' "

 

I am a scientist and you're obviously a fool!