One of the largest vaccine trials ever has been announced by St. Louis University. That trial will enroll 167 people.
You read that right. One of the largest vaccine trials ever will involve fewer than 170 people. If you thought that vaccines were tested over the long term and on lots of people, thing again.
Not only that, the trial appears to me as if it is an attempt to find a use for out of date, or useless old flu vaccines.
Flu vaccines are pretty much useless anyway, from where I sit, but they are valuable, at least from the point of their makers and the people who have purchased them so any use they can be put to would be welcome to those who own them.
In an article dated September 8, 2008, St. Louis University announced that it would be trying a novel approach to Pandemic Flu prevention: using an old flu vaccine approved in 2004 to prime [in other words, to irritate it-REL] in order to develop “protection” against another version of the Avian Flu when a shot for that (or a different) strain of the virus that causes Avain Flu is given.
If I did not know better, I would say that someone with a lot of money invested in ineffective, dangerous and outmoded vaccines was looking for a new use for them. You see, each year, the World Health Organization, the CDC and other organizations get together in the Spring of the year and literally guess, yes that is correct – GUESS – which strain of the so called “seasonal flu” is going to come around next fall and cause the disease we know as “the flu”.
How good are their guesses? Pretty bad. “Statisticians at CDC say that influenza is inherently unpredictable, that it’s such a random event that there’s no way that you can predict future outcomes,†said Forrest Nelson, professor of economics at the University of Iowa, says. http://scienceline.org/2007/05/23/hsu_health_flu-prediction/
Science Daily, reporting on a study published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, noted “Each year’s flu vaccine needs to be designed in advance, based on which strains of virus are anticipated to be prevalent in the coming year. Because the accuracy of that prediction varies, the effectiveness of the flu vaccine also varies from year to year.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070904072851.htm. This suggests, but does not document the CDC’s dismal record of prediction accuracy.
That record is so dismal, in fact, that a recent study which examined whether Seniors who were “properly” vaccinated were protected by the flu shot noted, ” Researchers say that older people suffering chronic conditions, such as lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, have even higher flu risk despite vaccination. Scientists thought that flu vaccine provides with 20-30% protection against pneumonia, but this research suggests that the protection level is only from 5% to 10%….Effectiveness of flu vaccine is different each year, it depends on how successful virus strain predictions for a current year will be. Flu vaccine cuts infection rates from 40% to 60% in the best cases.” http://www.emaxhealth.com/90/23622.html
But whether they are effective or not, flu vaccines are costly to make. True, they are wildly profitable if used but, when the populace figures out that they are both unsafe, unnecessary and do not provide protection, they do not use the stocks up, creating an economic blow for the highly economically motivated pharmaceutical companies.
On August 18, 2008, the St. Louis Business Journal wrote about the “quiet crisis” created by lack of increases in NIH funding. “St. Louis Business Journal — Five straight years of flat funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have Washington University and Saint Louis University scrambling to fill financial gaps with other funding sources to keep biomedical research projects going.
Officials at both universities said they increasingly are using internal funds and applying for grants from private foundations and pharmaceutical companies to make up for less NIH money….Besides nonprofits, another source to which researchers have turned is pharmaceutical companies, but that’s not ideal either
“Our work doesn’t really mesh with them,” said Dr. Randy Sprague, a professor of pharmacology and physiological science at Saint Louis University. ” http://www.biospace.com/news_story.aspx?NewsEntityId=107184
Apparently, however, their work meshes well enough to try to use old flu vaccines to pump up the effect of new ones (which may or may not be made from viral strains which may or may not be causing disease in a body near you.
But you never know. It might work. Or, then again, it might not.
Of course, the impact of experimental vaccines, or extra vaccinations (94% of all available flu vaccines still contain mercury and all of them contain several (or all of the following): bits of fetal and animal tissue, “stealth viruses” which can cause cancer and other potentially lethal diseases, aluminum hydroxide (associated with Alzheimer’s Disease and especially toxic in the presence of fluoride), alumino-fluoride complexes, Polysorbate 80 (known to cause sterility), MSG (a brain irritant), mercury, formaldehyde, mixtures of viruses and bacteria, sometimes dead or inactivated. None of the vaccines have been subjected to any long-term safety trials (longer than a few weeks). Most were only studied for a few days and then approved if nothing untoward was detected by the Medical Advisory Committees, many of whom had large share-holdings or other vested interests in the vaccine companies, as recently revealed in US Congressional hearings.” according to Mike Godfrey MBBS, FACAM, FACNEM. http://www.healthy.co.nz/healthy-developments-news-item-138.html
The race to vaccinate against everything anyone, adult or child, could possibly experience began when vaccine manufacturers decided to use the US Congress to build a bulwark against the tremendous losses they were incurring by having to compensate parents for the damages their vaccines were doing to children. “By the 1970s, the manufacturers were losing very costly court actions for vaccine-damaged infants. They successfully lobbied the US Congress by threatening to stop manufacture, and in 1986, Congress gave them immunity from prosecution. This unique legislation allowed a commercial organization total freedom to start developing vaccines for all childhood illnesses. It also resulted in a massive commercial drive to mandate vaccination for every child before entering school.” http://www.healthy.co.nz/healthy-developments-news-item-138.html
And, of course, once the child hood vaccination market had been secured, adults, especially healthy adults, were the next market.
Whether for use in children or adults, however, vaccines and their toxic components, have never, repeat, never, been tested for safety in combination. That means that their dangers are less than unknown. Since vaccine manufacturers are totally protected from product liability, at least in the US, there is no reason for a manufacturer to spend money making the vaccines safe or testing them to make sure that they are, at the very least, not harmful.
So it is not outside the realm of possibility that this “largest vaccine trial ever” is just another ploy to make more money from vaccine stocks. Whether or not that is the motivation behind this “largest vaccine trial ever”, there are so many distressing aspects to the trial it is hard to know where to begin. A good place might be not to take flu vaccines!
Yours in health and freedom,
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
Pandemic Preparation: SLU Launches Avian Flu Study
NIH-Funded Study Examines Combining Stockpiled and New Vaccines
Nancy Solomon
314.977.8017
solomonn@slu.edu
September 08, 2008
Pandemic Preparation: SLU Launches Avian Flu Study
NIH-Funded Study Examines Combining Stockpiled and New Vaccines
ST. LOUIS — Saint Louis University School of Medicine seeks volunteers for one of the largest avian flu clinical trials in the United States to test a new vaccine approach to prevent the disease.
The study will test whether an injection of an FDA-approved avian flu vaccine created in 2004 can “prime” the body’s immune system so a second shot of a different avian flu vaccine can protect against avian flu infection. The second vaccine is an investigational vaccine, which has not yet been given to people.
“This study will answer several scientific questions, but the most important one is whether you can prime with one strain of influenza vaccine and boost the body’s immune system with another,” said Robert Belshe, M.D., director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.
Vaccines protect against influenza by triggering the body to produce antibodies against infection. The study will examine the vigor of the body’s antibody response and the safety of the vaccines.
Creating an effective vaccine for the avian flu is challenging. Like any other influenza bug, the avian flu virus — known as H5 — is constantly evolving. In addition, two doses of vaccine are likely to be needed to prevent avian flu infection, said Belshe, who is the study’s principal investigator.
Avian flu occurs in birds, and in rare instances has crossed the species barrier to infect people. As of June 2008, the World Health Organization reported 385 human cases of avian flu and 243 deaths in Asia, Europe and Africa. The virus has not yet changed so it can be spread easily between people.
Public health experts are concerned that the avian flu could become the next influenza pandemic — or outbreak of disease that sweeps around the globe, causing millions of deaths worldwide — because previous outbreaks have been started by bird viruses. Consequently researchers are focused on finding a vaccine to protect against avian flu.
“Although many years have passed since the last major pandemic, the serious threat of pandemic influenza remains,” Belshe said.
“So far there has been no substantial leap between the bird species and humans. However other pandemics have started when the organism jumps between species and we’re worried it will happen again. A few genetic changes can occur in the virus and it would become highly infectious to humans. We’re trying to prepare.”
Saint Louis University is the lead site of the research, which is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health and will include up to five study sites. Of the 500 volunteers who are being recruited nationally, up to 167 people will be enrolled at SLU’s NIAID-funded Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit (VTEU).
The study involves four to nine visits to the VTEU and overall the study lasts six to 12 months, depending upon the group to which a participant is randomly assigned.
Potential study volunteers must be healthy, between 18 and 49 years of age, not pregnant and not allergic to eggs.
Participants will receive two vaccines — one or two doses of the 2004 avian flu vaccine that currently is stockpiled; one or two doses of the investigational vaccine that matches a different strain of the avian flu; or both vaccines.
For more information about enrolling in the study, please call the Saint Louis University VTEU at (314) 977-6333 or email vaccine@slu.edu.
Established in 1836, Saint Louis University School of Medicine has the distinction of awarding the first M.D. degree west of the Mississippi River. Saint Louis University School of Medicine is a pioneer in geriatric medicine, organ transplantation, chronic disease prevention, cardiovascular disease, neurosciences and vaccine research, among others. The School of Medicine trains physicians and biomedical scientists, conducts medical research, and provides health services on a local, national and international level.