Barbara Loe Fisher is a tireless advocate of both vaccine truth and choice and the Natural Solutions Foundation nominates her for our Hall of Fame. Barbara continues to examine carefully the vaccine industry, its products and its corruption. Her site, www.NVIC.org, is a mine of information and assistance on vaccine and vaccination issues. She is an ally and a resource of great value.
Barbara’s latest commentary on the corrupt – and corrupting – vaccine industry is a very important read.
In it she points out that vaccine safety and effectiveness have not been demonstrated by the studies published about them even in prestige journals. Those studies are of poor quality and show little that can be relied upon scientifically, but are, none the less, used as the evidence relied upon by vaccine courts to determine whether vaccines have harmed or killed anyone.
The Natural Solutions Foundation has filed a Citizens Petition with the Federal Trade Commission demanding hearings on whether vaccines are safe and/or effective and asking for a ban on any advertising or materials which suggest that they are either safe, effective or both until that fact is established.
And click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=2220) to read the latest news on the “accidental” Baxter International contamination scandal in which live, virulent Avian Flu H5N1 virus was somehow mixed with seasonal flu vaccine shipped to 18 countries. This mixture would allow re-assortment or mutation of the Avian Flu virus which currently is very ineffective in causing human disease. Such alteration of the virus could potentially allow it to become as deadly as the Avian Flu has been predicted to be when it causes the next “inevitable” pandemic. Of course, if it is mixed in with other flu viruses and injected “by accident”, the next pandemic really IS inevitable.
Please share this information as widely as possible, and make a tax deductible donation (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189) as generously as possible so that the Natural Solutions Foundation can continue to bring you vitally important information and fight for your health and freedom.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
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Vaccine Studies: Under the Influence of Pharma
Barbara Loe Fisher
If you take more than a casual look at the way the mass vaccination system in the U.S. works, you see that pharmaceutical companies marketing vaccines have a lot of clout.
It was the pharmaceutical industry that told Congress in 1982 that they were going to leave the nation without vaccines if they didn’t get liability protection but have opposed making it less difficult for vaccine victims to obtain federal compensation in the U.S. Court of Claims under a 1986 law that gave them liability protection.
It is Pharma lobbyists, who bully the FDA into fast tracking vaccines like Gardasil and who sit at the CDC’s policymaking tables urging that new vaccines be recommended for use by all children so they can persuade state legislators to mandate vaccines like influenza vaccine.
How Big Pharma Influences Medical Journals
A recent study published in the British Medical Journal reveals the clout that Big Pharma has in the world of medicine journal publishing, specifically the publishing of scientific articles about vaccines. In a Cochrane Collaboration review and analysis of published influenza vaccine studies found that influenza vaccine studies sponsored by industry are treated more favorably by medical journals even when the studies are of poor quality.
This analysis confirms that drug companies marketing vaccines have a major influence on what gets published and is said about vaccines in medical journals. It is no wonder that there are almost no studies published in the medical literature that call into question vaccine safety.
The preferential treatment of Pharma-funded studies also explains why the risks of an inappropriately fast-tracked vaccine like Gardasil are underplayed in the medical literature and why a physician like Andrew Wakefield, M.D. who dared to publish a study in 1998 in a medical journal (The Lancet) calling for more scientific investigation into the possible link between MMR vaccine and regressive autism, has been mercilessly persecuted for more than a decade, by both Pharma-funded special interest groups, as well as public health officials maintaining close relationships with vaccine manufacturers.
Study Finds No Correlation Between Quality of Study and Publication
This recent review identified and assessed 274 published studies on influenza vaccines for their methodological quality and found no relationship between study quality, publication in prestige journals or their subsequent citation in other articles.
The researchers also found that most influenza vaccine studies are of poor quality but those with conclusions favorable to influenza vaccinations are of significantly lower methodological quality. The single most important factor determining where the studies were published or how much they were cited was sponsorship, with those partially or wholly funded by the pharmaceutical industry having higher visibility.
The authors commented: “The study shows that one of the levers for accessing prestige journals is the financial size of your sponsor. Pharma sponsors order many reprints of studies supporting their products, often with in house translations into many languages. They also purchase advertising space in the journal. Many publishers openly advertise these services on their website. It is time journals made a full disclosure of their sources of funding”.
The HPV Vaccine — Just One Example of Inappropriate Influence Endangering Public Health
Last month the National Vaccine Information Center (www.NVIC.org) called on the Obama Administration and Congress to investigate Gardasil vaccine risks. NVIC has long questioned the inappropriate influence of vaccine manufacturers in federal vaccine licensing and policymaking and state vaccine mandates.
In 2006, Merck’s Gardasil vaccine was fast tracked by the FDA at Merck’s request and in 2007 Merck lobbyists mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign to get Gardasil mandated by state legislators for all sixth grade girls, which would have assured the big drug company a predictable market.
The Pharma lobbying effort in 2007 to get all states to mandate Gardasil failed but every other vaccine produced by drug companies and licensed by the FDA in the past quarter century has been mandated. Those new mandates were added to state vaccine laws by legislators and public health officials at the urging of vaccine manufacturer lobbyists and Pharma funded organizations touting vaccine studies published in the medical literature.
Massive Increase in Number of Vaccines Given
In the past three decades, the numbers of doses of government recommended vaccines for children and medical organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics has tripled to 69 doses of 16 vaccines, with 48 doses of 14 vaccines targeted to children under age six.
Pharma lobbyists have persuaded most states to pass laws requiring two to three dozen doses of most of the 16 government recommended vaccines. Last year New Jersey became the first state to mandate influenza vaccine for children attending daycare and school.
In the past few years, Dr. Jefferson has authored several independent reviews of influenza studies published in the medical literature for the Cochrane Collaboration, which have been published in the British Medical Journal, questioning the quality of published scientific evidence for influenza vaccine effectiveness and safety for the elderly as well as children.
Clearly, if the makers and marketers of vaccines can influence the quality and quantity of the scientific evidence published in the medical literature proving that vaccines are safe and effective — evidence that is used by states to mandate vaccines and by the U.S. Court of Claims to deny compensation to vaccine injured children — then Congress was wrong in 1986 to protect the makers and marketers of vaccines from liability for injuries and deaths caused by those vaccines.
Government Vaccine Recommendations Based on Tainted Evidence
The U.S. Court of Claims vaccine injury compensation awards, and state vaccine mandates are justified on the strength of scientific published in medical journals. It is time for medical journals to disclose all financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. It is time for studies questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines to receive a fair hearing in scientific journals rather than editors confining themselves to primarily publishing studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry maintaining that every vaccine is totally safe, effective and necessary.
Kudos to the British Medical Journal for having the integrity to publish Dr. Jefferson’s comprehensive analysis of pharmaceutical money influence on vaccine studies published in the medical literature. Hopefully, this will be a wake-up call for the scientific community, Congress and the public to put an end to the undue influence the pharmaceutical industry has on the science and policy of mass vaccination in the U.S.
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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
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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.