Pushing vaccines, hiding adverse effects: Flu pandemic may change US flu approach forever/ Reuters

photo of Julie Gerberding, Reuters

From Reuters' Maggie Fox, we learn that the swine flu "pandemic" has opened avenues for increasing vaccine uptake in the US... by grabbing children in schools, which might reduce the impact of seasonal influenza. (Let's experiment on tens of millions of American children to find out.)

The vaccine spin doctors know how to take every bit of news and turn it into an opportunity to increase Pharma profits. Let's spend a billion bucks and vaccinate 75 million children (yearly) to prevent 75 pediatric deaths (most of which occur in children with severe chronic illnesses)--and that is a best case scenario, occuring only if the vaccine strains are perfect matches to the flu viruses, and if efficacy is 100%.

The swine flu pandemic may have changed the U.S. approach to handling influenza forever, and for the better, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

While they said years of work were needed before vaccine production was up to the desired standard, some experiments such as vaccinating children in schools might work to help control seasonal influenza.

Yet in a 2006 New England Journal article on school-based vaccine programs, researchers found the results of the study were paradoxical: in families of children who attended schools that had vaccine programs, there were more adults and children who were hospitalized than in families of children from control schools that did not vaccinate. And vaccinated children had no fewer hospitalizations than unvaccinated children. So what do our public health policymakers suggest? Expand the experiment to all our children. Hello!?

As long as we continue to fail to perform active side effect surveillance for a meaningful duration, we'll never know how many cases of Bell's Palsy, Guillain Barre Syndrome, Crohn's Disease, Asthma, Diabetes, Lupus, Developmental Disorders, etc. are due to the vaccines. Instead, we can posit air pollution as the cause of autism (for example), as some "expert" did last week, or suggest that any other byproduct of modern society is the reason so many Americans are developing neurologic and autoimmune disorders, compared to years past.

Ever wonder why Julie Gerberding, former CDC director, moved the vaccine safety group into the Office of the Director at CDC? Could it be to maintain control over how aggressively they looked for side effects? She starts work next month as president of Merck Vaccines. A fitting reward for her success at keeeping the lid on vaccine injuries. Here's one method she used:

According to the NY Times' Gardiner Harris,

A new report finds that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a poor job of screening medical experts for financial conflicts when it hired them to advise the agency on vaccine safety, officials said Thursday... the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, found that the centers failed nearly every time to ensure that the experts adequately filled out forms confirming they were not being paid by companies with an interest in their decisions.

The report found that 64 percent of the advisers had potential conflicts of interest that were never identified or were left unresolved by the centers.

... little attention has been paid to the potential conflicts of advisers to the C.D.C., even though that agency’s committees have significant influence over what vaccines are sold in the United States.

Thanks, Julie. I'm sure you'll do a great job promoting school-based vaccine programs for many Merck vaccines, including blockbuster Gardasil. After all, you wouldn't want a 9 year old boy to get a case of genital warts, would you? (Yes, believe it or not, genital warts is the indication for boys aged nine and up to get this vaccine.)