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Published: July 28, 2006 at 3:39 PM
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor
WASHINGTON, July 27 (UPI) -- A medical doctor in the U.S.
House of Representatives
delivered a harsh judgment this week on public health authorities whose job is
making sure vaccinations are as safe as humanly possible.
"Federal agencies charged with overseeing
vaccine safety research have
failed," said Rep. David Weldon, R-Fla. "They have failed to provide sufficient
resources for vaccine safety research. They have failed to fund extramural
research. And, they have failed to free themselves from conflicts of interest
that serve to undermine confidence in the safety of vaccines.
"The American public deserves better, and increasingly parents and the public at
large are demanding better."
Weldon concentrated his fire on the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
which recommends the childhood immunization schedule through its Advisory
Committee on Immunization Practices -- and has conducted numerous studies that
find no association between vaccines and serious health problems, particularly
autism.
But Weldon said the federal government in toto has failed to do its job.
"Several issues relating to vaccine safety have persisted for years. The
response from public health authorities has been largely defensive from the
outset, and the studies plagued by conflicts of interest."
It should be noted the CDC stands behind its research and that last year it
separated its Immunization Safety Office from the National Immunization Program.
Weldon says that's simply not enough to ensure impartial, aggressive
investigation.
Weldon introduced a bill -- co-sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. -- that
would create a new agency of vaccine safety that reports to the secretary of
health and human services; require research to be independent of any
vaccine-related decisions; and establish an 18-member advisory committee to
create a vaccine research agenda. At least one-third of the committee would be
made up of people with vaccine injuries or a vaccine-injured child.
Given the realities of the legislative calendar, Weldon told me, he's hoping to
build support and hold hearings this fall on the measure and re-introduce it in
the new Congress that convenes in January.
Weldon's approach is wide-ranging. For one thing, he's not putting all his eggs
in the mercury-equals-autism basket, so to speak -- he's not asking for more
research solely to determine whether the mercury-based preservative thimerosal
triggered a huge rise in autism diagnoses in the 1990s.
While that question has been the focus of attention -- and properly so, given
the government's own decision to phase out thimerosal from routine childhood
immunizations beginning in 1999 -- there is the prospect that other vaccine
ingredients, and other side effects, may be insidiously at work.
"There are unresolved questions about the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine
that arose in 1998 that should be fully investigated," Weldon said.
Indeed, this column recently reported on a cluster of cases in Olympia, Wash.,
that suggest a possible risk of autism from getting MMR and chickenpox shots too
close together in a susceptible subset of children.
One of the children diagnosed with autism was in a clinical trial of a new
vaccine combining all four of those live-virus vaccines, including 10 times as
much chickenpox component as the standalone chickenpox vaccine. The
manufacturer, Merck & Co., acknowledged that case -- and another from a similar
trial in Olympia involving an experimental chickenpox vaccine given at the same
time as the MMR -- was not reported to the FDA until March.
That was the same month we first inquired about the cases -- and six months
after the new vaccine, called ProQuad, was approved by the FDA for all children
12 months to 12 years old.
Merck, like other vaccine manufacturers, mainstream medical groups and public
health authorities, says there is no association between vaccines and autism.
Weldon's bill would put that assertion to the test -- without the conflicts he
says make such assurances suspect.
Beyond autism, a range of concerns are "out there" about the childhood
immunization schedule, which has expanded greatly over the past two decades and
now includes a Hepatitis B shot on the day of birth and the prospect of more
combinations and components in coming years.
Few argue against the basic premise of mass vaccination against deadly diseases.
The legitimate public-policy question is whether the authorities have gotten the
details wrong -- vaccinating too soon against too many illnesses, not all of
them life-threatening or likely to afflict children, and undertaking too little
independent surveillance of possible unintended consequences.
From that perspective, it was hard to ignore the convergence of events at the
Capitol Wednesday morning -- as Weldon spoke, members were awaiting the arrival
of the
Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki,
to address a joint session.
In the new book "Fiasco" about the Iraq war by Washington Post Pentagon
Correspondent Thomas E. Ricks, the failure of public officials to properly gauge
the real risks and potential rewards of the invasion are laid out in devastating
detail.
"None of this was inevitable," Ricks writes. "It was made possible only through
the intellectual acrobatics of simultaneously 'worst-casing' the threat
presented by Iraq and 'best-casing' the subsequent cost and difficulty of
occupying the country."
That made me go back and dig out a paper titled "From Safety Last To Children
First," by Mark Blaxill of the group SafeMinds and Barbara Loe Fisher, president
of the National Vaccine Information Center. It was submitted to a CDC panel on
vaccine safety in 2004.
"The obvious concern is that benefits may be overstated and that risks will be
suppressed," they wrote in terms that eerily echo Ricks'. And they made the war
analogy explicit, citing "a mission of fighting a 'war on disease' that
disregards the secondary and tertiary consequences of war and views innocent
children as inevitable consequences."
"The language of conflict -- the 'war on disease,' 'combating the causes of
epidemics,' 'fighting emerging infections' -- is closely connected to the
language of military power and, of course, 'Disease Control.' History teaches us
that when government officials are determined to fight a war, any war, truth can
be the first casualty."
It would be ironic if the same patterns that led to a foreign policy "fiasco"
were at work in domestic health policy. Weldon's bill is a first step toward
finding out -- and making sure, if that did happen, it gets fixed before more
casualties pile up.
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