Vaccines and Pharmaceuticals

[Guest guest]

Notes on Vaccines and Pharmaceuticals

Compiled from back issues of the Well Being Journal

VACCINES, DIABETES AND AUTISM.. This excerpt from Health Alert might pique

a reader's interest

about vaccines a little more:

“I hope...you tuned in to the hearings on vaccines on Capitol Hill. If you

didn't, I'll clue you in—they

were an insult to human intelligence and a testament to special interests

and big money. Even the senators

conducting the hearings couldn't believe what was going on. They couldn't

coerce a simple answer from

any of the experts on the side of `more research [money] and vaccines.'...

Meanwhile, the parents in

attendance whose kids developed autism right after the measles, mumps,

rubella (MMR) vaccine were as

frustrated as the senators trying to get a straight answer to anything....

“The MMR vaccine is given between 12 and 15 months of age. Since the

mid-1980s when MMR came

into wide use, autism rates rose very sharply, with most cases being

recognized at 18 months of age. In

fact, a study released by an autism research center at the University of

California at showed a

273% increase in an 11-year period.... Today kids may receive up to 35

various vaccines before entering

the first grade—with 5 more on the immediate horizon [as suggested

preventives] including one for ear

infections!

“Autism is not the only theorized vaccine problem. Evidence is strong

relating vaccines [as well as

processed carbohydrate foods, sugars and hydrogenated oils] to the

spiraling cases of childhood diabetes.

For more information: www.vaccines.net.” (See Health Alert, September,

2000, Vol. 17:9, 5 Court

N., Monterey, CA 93940-5753.)

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GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS WHO OWN DRUG STOCK.

As far as reform of Medicare, healthcare and costs of drugs go in the

coming congress and administration of the U.S. government, here is partial

list of individuals and families to watch regarding legislation (and listed

are approximate amounts of dollars held in shares of pharmaceutical company

stocks):

The W. Bush family ($62,000-$234,000);

Dick Cheney ($150,000-$350,000);

Hadassa Lieberman ($15,000-$50,000);

Rep. Robin (over $11million as of 12-31-99);

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (ranking Republican on a judiciary subcommittee

“that often reviews patent legislation that can deliver windfalls to

name-brand drug companies,” $2.2 million-$7.1 million in five drug companies);

Kerry, wife of Sen. Kerry ($2.1 million-$4.2million in eight

drug companies).

It should be noted that W. Bush put all his stock into a blind trust

before the election and Dick Cheney, “on leave” during the presidential

campaign as a director of

Proctor & Gamble, planned to do the same if elected and to relinquish

11,000 options in P & G stock. The Bush senior healthcare advisor, Gail

Wilensky, held $10.5 million in shares and stock options in healthcare

companies. McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau reviewed 180

congressmen's latest financial disclosure statements and found that 36

members or their families owned drug company stocks.

(International Council for Health Freedom Newsletter, Winter 2001, Vol.

IV., No. 4, page 49; 1-619-702-1282.)

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FDA DRUGS, SAFE?

President Clinton once urged the FDA to view the drug industry as their

“partners,

not adversaries.” Right. Now the cost of this permissive attitude is

becoming clear. Seven drugs approved

since 1993 have been withdrawn from the market after reports of over 1,000

deaths, according to the Los

Angeles Times. The FDA disregarded danger signs and blunt warnings from its

own specialists. In cancer,

dangerous drugs are routinely approved under the perception that they save

lives. However, anticancer

drugs only need to show that they shrink tumors, not that they actually

increase survival. We must learn

to ask hard questions about the safety of all proposed cancer treatments.

—Ralph Moss, Ph.D., leading

cancer expert in conventional and complementary alternative cancer

treatments, in Townsend Letter for

Doctors and Patients, May, 2001 (p. 63, 911 Tyler St., Port Townsend, WA

98368, www.tldp.com).

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VACCINES: TREATMENTS WITH SIDE EFFECTS, NOT WONDER DRUGS.

“Although the effects of vaccines have been grossly understudied, some

recent investigations show that certain vaccinations may actually be making

children sicker.” So notes V. , M.D., in an article about

evidence that autism and other illnesses are caused by the DPT and MMR

vaccinations, and the investigations of

Harold E. Buttram, M.D., into those and other controversies surrounding

vaccinations. : “It's true that there may be situations, especially

in the medical world, in which extreme measures may be justified, as the

lesser of two evils, to preserve life and health. Yes, because of vaccines,

polio...and smallpox may have been eliminated worldwide. However, vaccine

proponents would have us believe that vaccines are wonder drugs and have

been largely responsible for controlling virtually all of the epidemics of

killer diseases in the U.S. With the exceptions above, the facts do not

show this to be the case.

“According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., from 1911

to 1935 the four leading causes of childhood deaths from infectious

diseases in the U.S. were diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), scarlet

fever, and measles. However, by 1945 the combined death rates from these

causes had declined by 95 percent. This [decline happened] before the

implementation of mass immunization programs. The greatest factors in this

decline were not vaccines but better sanitation, improved nutrition, better

housing with less crowded conditions, antibiotics, and the weakening of

these diseases through passage of time and serial passages through human

hosts.

“I won't deny that many lives have been saved due to the implementation of

vaccinations, but society shouldn't turn its back on their possible

negative side effects just because of historical ideas. It seems that

people have blindly accepted [vaccinations] without much question...or

safety testing....” (Nutrition & Healing News, V. 7, No. 9, 819 N.

St., Baltimore, MD 21201.)

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IMMUNIZATION DANGERS.

ph Mercola, M.D., writing in the American Association of Physicians and

Surgeons journal Medical Sentinel: “Immunizations contribute to the

enormous and tragic increase in autism in this country, and it is time

physicians take a stand on this issue and defend the patient's right to

choose.”

Currently there are only nineteen states in the U.S. that allow a

philosophical exemption to immunizations.

All but two, West Virginia and Mississippi, allow a religious exemption.

“It seems imperative,” states Mercola, “that the first step for physicians

who have not carefully studied this issue is to become informed.” To that

end, Mercola publishes a weekly newsletter that is free to subscribers at

http://www.mercola.com.

Focus is on the mandates from government and pharmaceutical company

alignments that impose vaccines upon citizens. There are over 5,000 pages

of articles for review

to help physicians “get up to speed.” (Medical Sentinel, V. 6, No. 1,

Spring, 2001: hfaria@

mindspring.com. P.O. Box 13648, Macon, GA 31208-3648.)

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ARTICLE BY GREG PALAST, a journalist for the Observer in London and the

Guardian, quotes Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz, a former world

bank official, and secret documents from inside the IMF in this article.

Here's a sample:

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO’s intellectual property

rights treaty (it goes by the acronym

TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist,

that the new global order has

" condemned people to death " by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to

pay to pharmaceutical

companies for branded medicines. " They don’t care, " said the professor of

the corporations and bank

loans he worked with, " if people live or die. " (From

www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=78 & row=1)

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LANCET QUESTIONS FDA INTEGRITY, CLAIMING DRUG INDUSTRY INFLUENCE. Patients

taking a controversial new drug for irritable bowel syndrome may have died

because the US Food and

Drug Administration has become the “servant of the drug industry,” claimed

the Editor of The Lancet, the

prestigious British medical Journal. (www.

medstudents.medscape.com/38029.rhtml?srcmp=meds-051801)

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SAME OLD PRESCRIPTIONS? “You know how physicians in the U.S. are trained:

they're taught to

fight every illness and medical condition with a prescription drug. What

you may not realize is that most

doctors get their education about new drugs from the drug companies. Maybe

you've seen the attractive

young men and women in expensive suits who hang out in your doctor's

office. What are they there for?

They're constantly feeding your physician company literature that

highlights the drugs' benefits and

obscures the drugs' side effects.

“The drug companies are brilliant—they make their fact sheets a lot easier

to read than the New England

Journal of Medicine! Why should doctors bother reading the actual medical

journals? Even if physicians

do read the journals, they probably don't realize that many of the studies

were paid for by the drug

companies and the articles were written by researchers directly or

indirectly being paid by the big

pharmaceutical companies.

“And those well-dressed men and women you see in the waiting room are

giving your physician a carton

full of free drug samples, which the doctors pass on to us, the patients,

in order to seem generous.

Doctors love to receive and give out free samples.

“The drug companies are taking your doctor out to lunch at four-star

restaurants and sending him or her

to expensive resorts for `professional seminars.' On what subject? The

newest drugs, of course!” —

R. Lee, M.D., in his Medical Letter, advising readers about natural

solutions to health challenges.

Medical Letter, PO Box 84900, Phoenix, AZ 85071, 1-800-528-0559.

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PHYSICIANS CALL FOR VACCINE MORATORIUM. A leading national physician

organization is

calling for a moratorium on all government mandated vaccines and has passed

a resolution to that end at

their annual meeting. Members of the Association of American Physicians and

Surgeons (AAPS) voted

this week at their 57th Annual Meeting in St. Louis to pass a resolution

calling for an end to mandatory

childhood vaccines. The resolution passed without a single “no” vote. (The

resolution and mandatory

vaccine fact sheet are posted at www.aapsonline.org.)

“Our children face the possibility of death or serious long-term adverse

effects from mandated vaccines

that aren't necessary or that have very limited benefits,” said Jane M.

Orient, M.D., AAPS Executive

Director. “This is not a vote against vaccines,” said Dr. Orient. “This

resolution only attempts to halt

blanket vaccine mandates by government agencies and school districts that

give no consideration for the

rights of the parents or the individual medical condition of the child.”

Forty-two states have mandatory vaccine policies, and many children are

required to have 22 shots before

first grade. On top of that, as a condition for school attendance, many

school districts require vaccination

for diseases such as hepatitis B—primarily an adult disease, usually spread

by multiple sex partners, drug

abuse or an occupation with exposure to blood. And yet, children under the

age of 14 are three times

more likely to suffer adverse effects— including death—following the

hepatitis B vaccine than to catch

the disease itself.

Source: www.rense.com. For more information, contact AAPS: 1601 N. Tucson

Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson,

AZ 85716; 1-800-635-1196; hotline: 1-800-419-4777; www.aapsonline.org.

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FDA PROTECTS...? “The manufacturers didn't know [what it would do] when

they started selling

[protease inhibitors]. The FDA didn't require them to show it would cure

AIDS and not kill the patient

anymore than they required them to show that about AZT [a formerly shelved

chemotherapy drug]. They

only required that a surrogate goal be met...[namely,] something we

[scientists] think may be related to

the disease in question that may be improved by the drug.... The surrogate

goal [construct] is an

indication that our FDA no longer serves our needs. Or at least it does not

serve our needs unless we own

stock in the pharmaceutical industry and don't [care] about health care.”

(Kary Mullis, Ph.D., Nobel

Prize-Winner, Chemistry, from Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, 1998,

Pantheon Books, Random

House, p. 184.)

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VACCINE MANDATES. “Although we recognize that vaccines, in the past, have

prevented many serious illnesses, it is simply a fact that every insurance

policy has a premium. Every medical intervention carries both risks and

potential benefits. The risk:benefit calculation is different for each

individual patient, and can only be made by the patient (or the patient's

guardian) in consultation with the attending physician.”

“It is the right of every patient to refuse a medical intervention, even if

recommended by the attending physician, and it is the duty of the physician

to advise according to his or her own best judgment.

Informed consent is a prerequisite for ethical medical treatment (or for

research), as is internationally recognized in the Nuremberg Code....”

The above excerpts are from a letter that was sent by the American

Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) to Health and Human Services

Secretary Donna Shalala in July. The AAPS also wrote to Harold Margolis,

M.D., Chief, Hepatitis Branch, Centers for Disease Control (CDC),

requesting details concerning the initial safety testing in children and

ongoing studies on possible neurological and other complications of

hepatitis B vaccine.

Reason: Methods used to implement universal hepatitis B vaccine in newborns

are questionable. Burton Waisbren, M.D., states that vigorous peer review

may have been circumvented by publishing of “invited” articles from drug

company-sponsored seminars in journal supplements. He also notes that CDC

officials

make personal visits to state boards of health.

One potential method of persuasion is to tie federal welfare funding to

immunization compliance.

All Kids Count, a Wood Foundation project set up to

establish immunization registries in every state, conceivably might play a

role. The program emphasizes enrolling newborns, and hepatitis B is the

only vaccine administered to newborns. “People really are seeing

[registries] as the way to institutionalize immunizing our real young

kids,” stated Watkins, executive director of the Decatur-based All

Kids Count organization.

The AAPS testimony has sparked numerous inquiries (including many by

newspapers and radio stations in Connecticut, and school district officials

in Philadelphia). And policy is beginning to change. All but two of

Connecticut's birthing hospitals have suspended routine hepatitis B

vaccines. A Virginia parent (who was notified of the vaccines his child

received only after the fact) told AAPS that his state has also suspended

hepatitis B vaccines in newborns of uninfected mothers. In a surprise

statement by the Surgeon General—almost as a footnote in a larger

announcement on halting the use of thimerosal as a vaccine

preservative—federal policy now deems the vaccine appropriate at birth only

if the mother is infected or of unknown status. “Federal officials did not

acknowledge that recent criticism from Congress, parents, and doctors

played any role in the policy change,” wrote Hanchette of Gannett News

Service.

See www.house.gov/refor/hearings for testimony from the Aug. 3 hearing

before the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, and

www.aapsonline.org for the AAPS written statement distributed at the

hearing. (AAPS News, 9/99, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd., Ste. 9, Tucson, AZ 85716.)

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PHYSICIANS CONCERN about vaccinations. In a recent study almost one-third

of physicians fear there is a risk of serious adverse reaction to the

pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine, and 13 percent thought the same about

the measles vaccine. Many are concerned about litigation from parents. Many

said they were

unlikely to recommend a third dose of the DTP

(diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis) vaccine. Findings were based on a survey of

1,236 doctors in the U.S.” (Arch Ped & Adolesc Med, 1998; 152: 12-19.) For

up-to-date information subscribe to the Vaccine News, 251 W Ridgeway Dr.,

Dayton, OH 45459,

937-435-4750.

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UNSAFE DRUGS APPROVED. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed three

approved

drugs from the market in 1998—more than in any other year. Redux caused

heart valve defects; Posicor,

serious drug interactions and fatal heart problems; and Duract,

sometimes-fatal liver damage. Why were

these drugs ever approved? According to Public Citizen's Health Research

Group, Congress—on the

behalf of sponsors in the drug industry—has been systematically weakening

the U.S. drug approval

process. In 1992 Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act

(PDUFA), authorizing drug

companies to pay user fees to the FDA for the hiring of additional medical

officers to review new drugs.

Then, in 1997, the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act (FDAMA)

expanded the use of

“accelerated approval” mechanisms for drugs for life-threatening

conditions, included mechanisms for

speeding FDA review, and allowed new drugs to be approved on the basis of

one clinical trial, instead of

two. In September, 1998, Lurie, M.D., and Sidney M. Wolfe, M.D., of

Public Citizen's Health

Research Group surveyed the FDA's medical officers to find out what was

going on inside the agency.

Among their findings: Of the 53 medical officers who responded, 19

mentioned 27 drugs that were

approved in the past three years over the opposition of the reviewing

medical officer. Eight reported 14

instances in which they had been instructed not to present their own

opinions or data to an FDA Advisory

Committee because to do so would have reduced the likelihood that a drug

would have been approved.

Thirty-four medical officers stated that the pressure on them to approve

new drugs was “somewhat

greater” or “much greater” than before 1995. One medical officer reported,

“In the last two years, I

recommended that two drugs not be approved. They were both approved without

consulting me. This

never happened before. In one case, the drug did not meet the standards set

up by the division, so they

modified the standards.” Lurie and Wolfe concluded that “changes in FDA

review and approval policies

.... appear to have led to a significant decline in the safety and efficacy

standards for new drugs.” They

also stated that new drugs have a greater likelihood of approval because of

“inappropriate pressure from

Congress, the drug companies, and senior FDA employees.” (Washington Post

12/30/98, and Public

Citizen's Health Research Group, www.citizen.org.)