AD: Another Bipartisan Multi-Billion Dollar Medical Boondoggle: How Biomedical Research Takes Congress And Our Money, Part 1 - Gary Krasner

Another Bipartisan Multi-Billion Dollar Medical Boondoggle: How Biomedical Research Takes Congress And Our Money, Part 1
By Gary Krasner (07/29/04)

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H.L. Mencken

On Wednesday, July 21, 2004, President Bush signed legislation to develop and stockpile vaccines and other antidotes to chemical and germ attacks. The President originally asked for the legislation 18 months ago in his State of the Union speech. The “Project BioShield” legislation is a $5.6 billion-dollar subsidy to the biomedical research industry to motivate them to create treatments and prophylaxis against biowarfare agents from terrorist attacks.

According to the Associated Press, “U.S. officials are hoping that Project BioShield will yield enough new-generation anthrax vaccine to dose 25 million people” […] and hope it “will provide antidotes for botulism and anthrax, a safer smallpox vaccine and a long-awaited children’s version of an anti-radiation pill.”

On the previous Wednesday, July 14th, 2004, members of the House Homeland Security Committee were trotted onto the House floor to speak in support of the Bioshield Initiative (S.15). Who trotted them out there? The biomedical research industry. They’re a composite of public health agencies, research institutes, universities, and pharmaceutical firms who each year depend upon government grants to sustain them.

Unfortunately, when it comes to public health and medical issues, legislators (as are journalists) are too fearful to challenge contentions from medical authorities. In bipartisan unity, they check reason and logic at the door and defer all opinions to the medical experts. In this case, the House approved the Bioshield Initiative on a 414-2 vote July 15, and the Senate supported it 99-0 last May.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), an author of the bill, said, “… this bill could save millions of lives.” Not that he actually knows that. I would wager he doesn’t know that biological weapons have proven to be totally ineffectual, as compared to say chemical weapons, which have proven their worth in theater battlefields. Though many would be surprised to learn that neither chem nor bio are considered true “weapons of MASS destruction.

But before I get into that issue, I’ll briefly explain why the public is so often beguiled by the “Medical Boys”, and also provide some advisories regarding precarious situations into which this legislation may drag this nation.

FEAR OF DISEASE IS THE KEY

One must wonder how the Medical Boys are able to ellicit this gift that keeps on giving, year after year. Last year it was HR 2122, but that version of Bioshield stalled over funding oversight provisions. The year before that it was HR 5710 (Homeland Security Act of 2002). That one funded drug and vaccine research in response to bioterrorism.

I happen to be a hawk on terrorism and foreign policy, as my other essays would clearly indicate. So my criticism of Big Medicine using bioterrorism to get their hands on billions in public funds has absolutely nothing to do with our general war on terrorism, which I support. I only need to point to renowned conservative Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, who for forty years has written passionately against vaccination, water fluoridation and medical hubris in general. Or to Regnery Publishing company’s proud support of “HIV=AIDS dissident” Peter Duesberg in their publication of “Inventing The AIDS Virus” (1996).

Fear of terrorism is just the latest vehicle upon which the Medical Boys are milking public funds, but the key to squeezing money from the public has always been to instill another kind of fear. ‘Fear of disease’ is the primary force driving biomedical research, and it paves the way for every sort of medical mandate. Before 9-11, the Emerging Virus Mania had even been hauled out to justify the spraying of the nerve agent, malathion on the heads of eight million New Yorkers.

The instrument of control of the lower classes used to be their fear of God, or of imprisonment and torture. Today, the comparable primal fears are manifested through fear of death and sickness from disease. The affairs of mortality and longevity have become secularized and are now the dominion of the priests of allopathic medicine. Specifically, control is attained by fostering the public’s feelings of dependency on modern medicine’s promise to halt disease and prolong life. Disease is now considered an inevitable part of life for this drug-dependent public.

Concentration of wealth from profits from medical products and services is the ultimate goal. But ‘control’ is the essential means to that end. The fact that all the pesticides, chemicals, devitalized foods, vaccines, and drugs actually creates the diseases in the first place is the ‘beauty’ of this cycle of deception. So potent is this new “religion” (modern medicine) that even most of its promoters are sincere adherents to its precepts. The fiction that disease is transmissible is a fundamental part of this religion that they impress upon the public. It ensures the careers of the researchers and the profits for the institutions.

Fear of transmissible disease based on the standard (and currently dominant) infectious disease paradigm has afforded to government the rationale to take children away from mothers who reject vaccination, AZT, ritalin, chemotherapy, and a host of other toxic assaults touted as therapeutic (often with the help of vindictive former spouses working with Child Protection Services). It has allowed them to convict and imprison HIV positive individuals for supposedly spreading AIDS. It has allowed them to forcibly quarantine or medicate TB patients and people infected with other microbes they deem contagious. It has permitted hospitals to employ a triad of diagnostic criteria common to both vaccinal injuries and Shaken Baby Syndrome (i.e.: subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage, and diffuse axonal injury), to assist prosecutors in convicting innocent parents, thereby enabling hospitals to defer costly malpractice lawsuits (almost 2000 SBS prosecutions in the U.S. annually - a sudden epidemic, supposedly?). It allowed Dr. David Sencer to persuade President Ford to appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent a nonexistent epidemic. And it allows biomedicine to torture lab animals in the name of sacrosanct ‘medical research’, and to compel pet owners to vaccinate their animals for fictitious microbial-caused diseases, like rabies, and Feline Leukemia.

And by equating sex with death, they have even convinced men to use condoms. Now that’s real influence and control, especially when you consider that condoms are actually porous to viruses, and are coated with asbestos-like talc and carcinogenic non-Oxynol 9.

THE DEBACLE OF LIMITED LIABILITY PROTECTIONS

There’s one thing that vaccine manufacturers have in common with nuclear power plants and “acts of God”: Private insurers will not underwrite them for damages. Insurance companies aren’t stupid. They live or die by the accuracy of their liability tables, and they are the best in the business at assessing risk. And sure enough, drug companies are already showing signs that the Bioshield incentives are insufficient.

In Michael Barbaro’s, “Bioshield Too Little for Drug Industry” (The Washington Post, July 26, 2004) at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13873-2004Jul25.html), he writes that the program “has received a largely lukewarm response from the companies it was designed to help”, partly because “the possibility of devastating patient lawsuits if a drug fails.”

He writes that executives “complain that it does not offer complete liability protection should a drug have adverse effects on patients or fail to protect them against a pathogen, which could lead to lawsuits.” Frank M. Rapoport, who represents vaccine maker Aventis Pasteur SA, said “Until the liability question is solved, we’re not going to see big drug companies come to the table - they have too much to lose.”

Barbaro writes that Congress had rejected industry efforts to include stronger liability protections in the Bioshield bill, along with other provisions they wanted. Yet he reports that Anthony S. Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “expects Congress [will] address the industry’s biggest concerns, such as liability.”

Thus, the tug of war begins, and it appears that Bioshield will inevitably require greater funding than the intended $5.6 billion appropriation over 10 years. As the Homeland Security Act of 2002 demonstrated, vaccine manufacturers will demand that the taxpayers extend to them limited liability protections for their products. You’ll recall that in December 2002, Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) tried to insert a provision in the Homeland Security Act for the government to indemnify the manufacturers of small pox vaccine and other vaccines used for national defense, and those who will administer them. Punitive damages were to be banned outright, and the federal government would litigate compensatory damages on behalf of the manufacturers, after cases would be channeled through the federal tort system used for childhood vaccines that limits injury compensation to a maximum $250,000.

GOVERNMENT COMPENSATION: PAST IS PROLOGUE

But this tort system that had begun almost 2 decades ago, has led to a horrible debacle whose effects are resonating today:

By the late 1970’s, there had been so many successful lawsuits for vaccine injuries from childhood vaccinations that not a single insurance company was willing to underwrite vaccines marketed in the U.S. In 1986, Congress undertook to insure vaccine products by enacting the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). It was intended that the government assume liabllity in tort for non-negligently caused vaccine injuries. However, following the law’s passage, the government under-funded the program and made it highly adversarial. Hearings for claims are now complicated, drawn-out, and hostile to petitioners. Funds that have been awarded have been meager, usually falling far below the total costs incurred by families over the long term. Compensation is also awarded too late - long after medical and related expenses bankrupt the family. Despite this, so far over a billion dollars has been awarded for vaccine injuries, with thousands of cases still pending.

A fundemental fault in the system stems from the authorization of HHS to perform the conflicting roles of adjudicating claims, and establishing the criteria for causality. Secretary of HHS Donna Shalala, for example, had artifactually narrowed or eliminated contraindications based on mere budgetary considerations - often in contravention of IOM recommendations - in order to exclude many kinds of injuries eligible for federal compensation, thereby minimizing monetary awards the government must pay to families. (Authority for HHS to do this was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeals.) HHS has also been accused of this manipulation in order to maintain public confidence in the efficacy of immunization programs.

How could they possibly compromise their integrity this way? Just consider that they invested in a career in which they first were indoctrinated with an exaggerated hubris and confidence in the conventional theory of infectious disease and the notion that vaccination is modern medicine’s greatest achievement, and then embarked on a career path in which they either promoted or administered vaccinations. Of those that enter the public health services, can we really expect them to impartially interpret and report on vaccine safety and effectiveness, or to extend compensation for delayed reactions in children, and thereby undermine the efficacy of vaccination programs that they operate? How else can HHS deny there are causal relationships between vaccines and dozens of diseases, as well as reject grant applications year after year from accredited researchers and institutions who want to investigate the associations, or the basic science that may unravel the causes, if it’s not to sustain the disease paradigm that’s become the cornerstone of their profession, and defend it when it’s under attack?

The overtly strict rules for establishing causality by HHS are apparent when viewing the stark differences in the adverse effects listed in the HHS Vaccine Injury Table, as opposed to the Physician’s desk reference, or the more cautious (and honest) manufacturer’s product inserts that protects companies from liability - a condition of NVCIA under Public Health Service Act, Section 2122, Direct Warnings (Else why would they even consider listing adverse effects?)

Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) introduced remedial legislation that would rectify at least some of the system’s failings. However, what their bill cannot rectify is the inherent folly in having taxpayers assume the liability costs of a product that poses acknowledged adverse reactions, and is universally administered to children through state health mandates (the so-called “No Shots, No School” laws, where in many states the legal exemption provisions are difficult to qualify). As an analogy, it would be as if the federal government assumed the product liability costs of Ford automobiles, and every state thereafter mandated that only Fords be driven. No doubt the subsequent percentage of Ford’s revenue spent on safety testing would be close to 0.00%. Hence, parent and consumer organizations argue that it’s naive to assume that vaccine safety can improve under the compensatory mechanism for vaccines in place today.

SWINE FLU: CASE IN POINT

As far as government compensation goes, the swine flu vaccine fiasco might have been a prototype for the NCVIA indemnification program, and may possibly become a forerunner for Project Bioshield. Despite only a handful of suspected cases, vaccinations against swine flu began on October 1, 1976. The vaccine was targeted at the 151 million people age 18 and over, though only 43 million were eventually vaccinated. The program was halted on December 16, 1976, after public health authorities urged there be a moratorium on the campaign, partly because an epidemic seemed increasingly unlikely, and also because there were sporadic reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) following vaccination.

Before the vaccination campaign got underway, the insurance companies refused to issue coverage for adverse health effects resulting from vaccination, and the drug companies refused to produce the vaccine without coverage. To break the stalemate, the federal government assumed liability. [The “Swine Flu Act” provided that claims were to be brought under the Federal Tort Claims Act, 28 U.S.C. §§ 1346(b) (1976), 2671-2680 (1994).] Thus, GBS victims applied for compensation to the federal government, instead of suing the vaccine makers.

In addition to 500 cases of GBS that were medically established to be caused by the vaccine, there were 3,905 claims filed alleging other types of vaccine-induced injuries, totaling about $4 billion in damages. Of these claims, only 1,1607 progressed to lawsuits. Only 267 claims or lawsuits had been administratively allowed or settled out of court.

The indeterminate and variant outcomes of vaccine lawsuits generally reflects the difficulties in establishing scientific culpability. Determining the degree of the causal relationship is difficult because the reporting system was poor (like the one we have today is), and GBS may be triggered by blood poisoning other than vaccination. Also, vaccines cause delayed reactions that are sometimes expressed many weeks following the injection. Thus, it’s difficult to be precise regarding the actual number of people killed, paralyzed, or neurologically impaired from this one vaccine.

A paper by Langmuir (1979) estimated that by January of 1977, more than 500 cases of GBS had been reported, with 25 deaths. Based on the weekly numbers of vaccinations, a comparison of observed with expected cases showed that the relative risk of acquiring GBS during the six weeks after vaccination was about ten (10) times the endemic expectation. Breman, et al. concluded that immunization clearly led to an increased risk of GBS, but the risk period was only for six weeks post-vaccination, similar to a number of some earlier studies.

On October 6, 2003, the Institute of Medicine’s Immunization Safety Review Committee, (of the National Academy of Sciences) released a report on current flu vaccine safety issues, stating there were inconsistencies in the scientific data and methodological problems with studies published that prevented a more definitive conclusion. Yet the Committee agreed that there was a causal relationship between the 1976 swine flu vaccine and the paralytic disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome in vaccinated adults.

Suffice to say that a great deal of resources are expended in screening potentially valid claims from frivolous ones. That was true with the swine flu vaccine injury claims. But the government was under no legal obligation to pay vaccine injury claims. And until June 1978 it refused to assume any obligation to compensate, beyond the minimum legal requirements to do so. By that I mean that the P.L. 94-380 (the legislation under which the Federal Government assumed the liability of the swine flu vaccine) did not require the government to compensate victims of legitimate vaccine related injuries. Instead, the law permitted the Federal Government to assume that the manufacturers would uphold their “duty to warn” of potential or known adverse reactions from the vaccine. That meant that the government was not liable for proven claims of vaccine injuries, provided the vaccinees were duly forewarned about them. Technically, the government merely assumed the manufacturers’ ‘legal liability’. In prior vaccine injury cases, courts had never imposed an ‘absolute liability’ on vaccine makers (i.e., liability based on a causal relationship between vaccination and injury).

This is not well understood by the public. And the confusion over the legal theory of strict liability in tort was compounded by the HHS’s decision to exceed what they were legally required to do, and compensate swine flu vaccinees who developed GBS. But today, with the government now providing more funding for vaccine development and the purchase of vaccines, the public had better learn this, because voluntary payments to compensate people may ultimately be at the discretion of the Department of HHS. Current Federal policy on vaccine-related injuries involving government vaccination programs is largely based on the model provided by the Swine Flu Act. HHS is assuming the obligation to warn of side effects from vaccine manufacturers through the vaccine purchase contracts. Its plan has been to devise informed consent statements and procedures for their distribution to the public, which it hopes will meet court tests of ‘adequate prior notification’.

Thus, whether it’s compensation for childhood vaccines for children in school, or it’s for vaccines against biowarfare agents for first responders, the posture of HHS is adversarial: It wants to be in the position to argue in court that by signing an informed consent form, a vaccinee has assumed the risk of injury and is therefore not entitled to compensation. The fact that the government chose to provide compensation for GBS from swine flu vaccination 3 decades ago is not a guarantee it will do so today with other vaccines.

At any rate, following swine flu, the pharmaceutical industry must have envisioned that indemnification by taxpayers is possible. It’s now the basis for vaccination programs for children (in need of massive reform), and it’s looking like it will be the basis for Project Bioshield. It’s ironic that these later programs have inherited the legacy as its progenitor: a compensation system of dubious merit, based upon vaccines produced of dubious need, based upon a science of dubious efficacy (as I will explain soon).

All dubious, nonetheless achieved by the public health community, whose sacrosanct expressions of ‘grave concerns’ are always accepted as given by a public paralyzed by fear.

INHERENT PROBLEMS OF GOVERNMENT-FUNDED LIABILITY PROTECTION

The aforementioned hypothetical analogy of the government underwriting and then mandating the purchase of the Ford automobile, and the subsequent minuscule investment in the car’s safety one can expect by Ford, is fine as far as it goes. But vaccination as a medical practice is a far more hazardous undertaking than medicine acknowledges. Thus, limiting or deferring corporate liability for this particular product can become more costly - and ultimately produce vaccines that are more deadlier - than the disease itself (at least that’s been the calculation with regards to the hepatitis b vaccine recommended for babies and toddlers at low risk for hepatitis).

Despite FDA estimates that 9 out of 10 reactions go unreported, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) receives annually between 12,000 and 14,000 reports of adverse reactions, including hospitalizations, injuries and deaths following vaccination. About 17 percent range from life-threatening illness to death. Over 30 thousand reports of adverse reactions have been associated with the recently mandated (in most states for school children) hepatitis B vaccine alone, with perhaps over 500 deaths. Follow-up surveys indicate many deaths and injuries that parents reported were not recorded by the system at all. All told, each year there may be well over a million new health problems in children that appear soon after vaccination, with no mechanism in place to determine which ones have a causal relationship to the vaccine.

According to the April, 1996 FDA Pink Sheet, members of the Vaccines & Related Biologicals Advisory Committee cited flaws in the VAERS program including “1 - passivity of the surveillance system; 2 - under reporting; 3 - lack of a control population; 4 - inability to determine causal relationships; 5 - imprecise definition of ‘serious’ events; and 6 - lack of a mechanism to detect delayed adverse events”. Further flaws in the program were also noted by Dr. Robert Chen, MD, Chief of the Centers for Disease Control Office of Vaccine Safety & Development. FDA Pink Sheet dated June, 1996, reports his comment: “Of all the positive things that were done by the Vaccine Compensation Act…one thing that (was) more or less neglected is research. They (legislators) found a mechanism to fund an injury compensation program after the injury has already happened, but there’s really no way at this point to fund research to try to prevent such injuries.” Hence the inherent flaw in underwriting products that someone else profits from.

Because of the problems I’ve described and more, the 4,000 members of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) - a professional association of physicians founded 1943 - voted on November 2000 at their 57th Annual Meeting in St. Louis to pass a resolution calling for an end to all state mandatory childhood vaccinations. The resolution passed without a single “no” vote. (www.aapsonline.org).

Barbara Loe Fisher, President of the National Vaccine Information Center recently wrote:

“Now, parents (from many countries) of old and young vaccine injured children are joining with enlightened doctors in a rejection of the unscientific a priori assumption that a child’s mental, physical and emotional regression after vaccination is only coincidentally but not causally related to the vaccines recently given. They are calling for credible basic science research into the biological mechanism of vaccine adverse events to develop pathological profiles which will separate health problems caused by vaccines from those that are not; the development of screening techniques to identify children at genetic or other biological risk of developing vaccine-induced health problems; the institution of informed consent protections in vaccination laws; re-examination of vaccine licensing standards; and an end to one-size-fits-all vaccination policies.”

CAN THE PROBLEMS BE OVERCOME ?

It’s not likely, to be realistic. One problem I described earlier is that the same entity (HHS) is given the conflicting roles of adjudicating claims, and establishing the criteria for causality. It would be akin to allowing prosecutors to establish rules of evidence, and allowing them to adjust those rules whenever they feel they’re not winning enough cases. Assuming we can reduce the monopolistic role of government and government doctors in running the system, there remains additional problems, and false solutions.

In 2002, Senator Frist offered the simplistic argument that taxpayer indemnification of the drug companies will prevent trial lawyers from feeding at the trough with frivolous lawsuits. But the problems that plague the tort law system do not automatically establish government compensation as the solution. Tort reform that involves limits on awards and sanctions against frivolous actions are akin to sentencing guidelines in criminal courts. Juries cannot sentence someone who runs a red light to 10 years in jail, for example. A fundamental precept of law is that the punishment should fit the crime. And there’s no reason why civil lawsuits cannot establish similar reasonable guidelines.

An additional goal of the Bush Administration might severely threaten the ability of parents to obtain sufficient and just compensation for vaccine injuries. Robert Pear writes in the NY Times (July 24, 2004: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2700070) that the Administration has been arguing in federal courts that “consumers cannot recover damages for such injuries if the products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.” The Justice Department has made some headway with medical devices. Since this is consistent with the President’s position on tort reform, drugs and vaccines are likely to be next.

Robert Pear wrote, “Allowing consumers to sue manufacturers would ‘undermine public health’ and interfere with federal regulation of drugs and devices, by encouraging ‘lay judges and juries to second-guess’ experts at the FDA, the government said in siding with the maker of a heart pump sued by the widow of a Pennsylvania man.”

In my essay, “Deliberation by Consensus”, I describe a doctrine called, “high medical authority”, in which courts have come to accept as a given, the consensus view of mainstream medical opinion. With this new initiative from the Administration that provides product immunity from the FDA, the sole view accepted by the judiciary narrows accepted opinion even further, to be solely determined by a government health agency, whose commissioners routinely shuttle back and forth to positions in the drug industry.

High medical authority (opinion that cannot be questioned) also seems to permeate the general debate over the efficacy of government-funded compensation. Only it’s transparent to all except dissidents to the conventional theory of infectious diseases, like me.

For example, the theories that biological agents are communicable and/or infectious (both true) and that they cause disease in the recipient (not true), are partly the basis for the theory of “herd immunity” - a concept so full of holes that one can even find the evidence that it’s erroneous from mainstream medical journals. Yet with the imprimatur of high medical authority, these theories are not to be challenged in the courts, which is precisely why state mandatory vaccination laws were upheld beginning a century ago.

Thus, an argument in favor of government compensation is that mass vaccination programs not only protect each vaccinated individual from a disease, but also provides “herd immunity” - a concept which states that if a there’s high enough percentage of vaccinated people in a population, then that will create a condition which purportedly confers protection on the minority of unvaccinated in the population. Vaccination proponents therefore argue that it serves the collective good. Parenthetically, they also see the unvaccinated as getting a “free ride”. For these reasons, they feel that compelling people to be vaccinated is justified. Conversely, the unvaccinated feel equally justified to remain so, based on religious or scientific objections to the practice, or based on their calculation of risk vs. benefit of the individual vaccine.

Nevertheless, believers in the efficacy of vaccination - those in power over the “nonbelievers” - would argue that the vaccinees had taken a risk that benefited society as a whole, and therefore should not be burdened with the individual task of suing for compensation. They would say that vaccination (supposedly) benefits society as a whole, and lawsuits represent an unfair cost imposed on manufacturers or the government, and lays the whole burden of the injury on the individual. Some litigants will be successful, while others will not. Thus, a judicial approach to compensation is unfair and inequitable. And given the usual time frames for lawsuits, even successful litigants wait several years before receiving payments.

The counter-arguments have already been touched on. Certainly the highly adversarial system and restrictive criteria that define ‘vaccine injury’ and causality in the current government compensation system belies any claim that it’s intended to ease the burden on the injured. Also, injuries are quantifiably predictable and can arguably be considered among the costs of doing business, and consequently should be shouldered by the manufacturer. Vaccines for children already have some of the costs of compensation built into the price of the vaccine.

And of course many injuries are sustained by children of parents who tried, but could not qualify for legal waivers from compulsory vaccines. With manufacturers grossing billions of dollars in the vaccine market today, what possible reasons could there be for them not to bear most of the costs of compensating the injured?

In support of the legal initiative I mentioned earlier, which I referred to it as, “product immunity via the FDA”, the Administration argues that “the threat of lawsuits can harm the public health” by inducing manufacturers to withdraw products from the market or issue warnings that overemphasize the risks and lead to “underutilization of beneficial treatments.” But this argument doesn’t apply to vaccines and drugs for treatment from exposure to biowarfare agents. States purchase massive amounts of childhood vaccinations, and Project Bioshield will assure manufacturers that the federal government will purchase their products. And with government-funded compensation, which other industries in the commercial sector can claim to be so favored?

The Administration’s legal maneuvers that seeks to bar lawsuites of FDA-approved products may also deny just compensation for vaccine injuries adjudicated outside the federal arbitration system. The greatest injustice is that these parents would have risked losing custody of their children to local Child Protective Services (and often do) had they decided that it was prudent to forego the vaccines that ultimately injured their children. How can parents protect their children from the fiat of public health excesses under such oppressive laws? Why are parents not permitted to make responsible medical decisions about their own children based upon their conscientious research and intimate knowledge of their children and family medical history? Why must public health officials have the final word regarding other people’s children?

If past is indeed prologue, and private vaccine firms don’t take the Bioshield incentives, we can expect that the rationale for government indemnification will next be suggested for these products. But Republicans of all people should know better: Accountability is an essential cornerstone of modern commerce. It’s either that, or we accept socialism, in which the government manufactures the vaccines. But for government to solely underwrite the products of private companies is a grotesque hybrid of both systems: It eliminates time-tested checks and balances by permitting the private sector to gladly accept profits, without assuming proportional risks, thereby ensuring that product safety takes a back seat. We’ve already adopted that system for childhood vaccines, and it has proven to be a public health disaster, destroying thousands of lives and families.

EBOLA - THE NEW WEREWOLF OF MEDICINE

In their support of the Bioshield Initiative on July 14th, I was struck by the number of floor speeches that mentioned a rare and relatively new disease. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-LA), Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Rep. Jim Turner and others all invoked one of the greatest bogeyman of the purported emerging viral menaces: ebola.

There’s only one problem with this uniform invocation: The supposed dreaded ebola epidemic failed to materialize, and the ebola virus may not even be pathogenic. The CDC claimed that 108 people may have been killed by ebola in Zaire in 1995. However, there had been no further deaths and not a single case has ever been reported in the U.S. or Europe. As historian Elizabeth Etheridge wrote, “the epidemic was virtually over before their work [CDC & WHO] began” (Sentinel for Health, 1992).

Considering the speed from exposure to death, the mortalities were more likely the result of a chemical toxicological agent. A couple of other indications point in that direction: Symptoms were never seen outside the localized area where it began. And 20 per cent of the 55 million Zairens are ebola virus antibody-positive, having survived the virus without apparent disease (Dietrich J.,1995).

One guess is that those who became sick had been exposed to the deadly cleaning solvents and oils that are often left at military base camps - possibly from groundwater contamination. Indeed, civil wars extending across 8 nations in central Africa killed about 2.5 million African civilians between 1998 and 2001 alone. Yet we will spend a billion dollars for an ebola vaccine because 100 people purportedly died from the disease?! ‘Fear of transmissible disease’ is potent indeed.

If it were not for the gullible media and fanatical virus hunters seeking fame and fortune, this virus would have joined the ranks of the thousands of known harmless passenger viruses. According to renowned molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, “these many outbreaks provide the CDC with its inexhaustible source of epidemics” (Inventing The AIDS Virus, 1996).

Indeed, most people would be surprised to learn that there are more than one thousand outbreaks worldwide each year, including colds, seasonal flus, hepatitis, and numerous noninfectious syndromes, all running their course and disappearing, often despite remaining unexplained by scientists.

To make their job even easier, public health agencies have assumed wide discretion in announcing “public health alerts”. The CDC loosely defines an “epidemic” as 2-3 confirmed cases clustered in a given area. An “area” may be a few city blocks, or an entire country. An “outbreak” is defined as at least one case in one area. Often, if one person living in a household has a confirmed case of a “communicable” disease, then there’s no need to draw blood to test anyone else with similar symptoms living in that same household.

ANTHRAX

But the obvious and most common reference made by all the legislators sponsoring the Bioshield Initiative was to Anthrax. They all recalled the anthrax cases following 9-11, and how the U.S. was paralyzed with fear (with great help from the media stoking those fears). Some of the lawmakers experienced the anthrax incidents firsthand.

It’s important that we examine the actual threat that anthrax poses. Because of limited space, I can only deal with anthrax, even though there are many parallels I can make to the other (supposed) microbial threats that may be employed by terrorists.

I should also point out at the outset that this critique solely addresses biological agents. By contrast, chemical agents are quite dangerous and pose one of the greatest threats from terrorists. Whatever proportion of the funds from the Bioshield Initiative (and it’s likely to be small) that goes towards developing antidotes from exposure to chemical weapons will be well spent.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PENTAGON’S ANTHRAX VACCINE

First, it should be briefly pointed out that among the first candidates for purchase through Bioshield are next-generation anthrax vaccines. The government eventually hopes to stockpile enough doses to inoculate 25 million people. The hope is that the newer type of vaccine could cut in half the number of shots now required for anthrax inoculation, with few side effects.

The bill also would accelerate the approval process for vaccines and, in an emergency, let the government distribute certain treatments before the Food and Drug Administration approves them. But this is one reason why the current anthrax vaccine that the Pentagon swears by, has become so controversial and appears to be both ineffective and harmful.

Mainstream news organizations are rarely critical of vaccination programs. But a Dec. 12, 2003 USATODAY.com report on the U.S. militaries’ Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program contained the following quotations:

• According to a 2002 survey by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, 84% of the Air Force Reserve and National Guard troops who received anthrax vaccines since they became mandatory in 1998 had reactions. They included difficulty breathing, muscle aches, headaches and dizziness.

• The Pentagon acknowledges that the death of reservist Rachel Lacy, 22, last April may have resulted from an anthrax vaccine. Veterans’ groups; the National Vaccine Information Center, a public awareness group; and some members of Congress are calling for better research to determine whether more than 10 other deaths and hundreds of illnesses, from pneumonia to blood clots, may be linked to the vaccines.

• The GAO said concern about mandatory anthrax shots was the main reason cited by two thirds of pilots and crew who left Air Force guard and reserve units from 1998 to 2000. After then vaccines were curtailed for two years because of shortages. Yet the Pentagon increasingly relies on these forces to relieve regular troops. Recruiters fear long tours of duty may drive many reservists away; mandatory shots are an added worry. The Army Reserve already missed a retention goal by 6.7% this year.

• The Pentagon insists its vaccinations are safe. And for most people, they are. But they aren’t risk-free. Last year [2002], the Food and Drug Administration warned that 5% to 35% of those who get shots could experience any of 40 side effects. About 6% of reactions can cause death, hospitalization or permanent disability.

• Those risks, combined with the U.S. military’s failure to find any biological weapons in Iraq so far, make a strong argument for a moratorium on mandatory vaccines - at least while two safer anthrax vaccines are being developed.

• Britain, with the most troops in Iraq after the U.S., made the anthrax vaccine voluntary this year [2003]. Since then, more than half of its soldiers have refused the shots. Australia, which also has troops in Iraq, has a voluntary anthrax vaccination policy as well.

USATODAY concluded:

• More than 500 soldiers [as of this news report] already have received punishments ranging from demotions to court-martials for refusing required anthrax shots.

• The Pentagon says vaccines are essential to protect soldiers’ health - particularly from anthrax in Iraq, which developed biological agents. But that doesn’t trump the Defense Department’s equal obligation to investigate and weigh potential problems. Instead, it clings to its policy of mandatory vaccinations, even as other countries are moving toward voluntary programs with successful results. The dug-in U.S. position forces concerned soldiers to choose between possibly endangering their health and ending their military service at a time when troop strength already is stretched.

There are even greater mind-numbing facts about the anthrax vaccine, some of which may be found at:
http://www.federalobserver.com/archive.php?aid=1326
http://www.avip2001.net/NewsArticles.htm
http://www.milvacs.org/tiger.cfm

Continue to page two.

(Printer friendly version) Email: Gary Krasner



	Design � 2003-2008 American Daily. Content �2003-2008 of its respective author. Pursuant to Title 17 U.S.C. 107, other copyrighted work is provided for educational purposes, research, critical comment, or debate without profit or payment. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for your own purposes beyond the 'fair use' exception, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. *Views are those of individual authors and not necessarily those of American Daily. Powered by Nucleus CMS Copyright �2005-2008 MoveOff,LLC	We use StatCounter