Monday, April 26, 2010
Frontline Examines The War Between Vaccine Opponents and Public Health Officials
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FRONTLINE Presents
The Vaccine War
Tuesday, April 27, 2010, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
www.pbs.org/frontline/vaccines
Vaccines have changed the world, largely eradicating a series of terrible diseases, from smallpox to polio to diphtheria, and likely adding decades to most of our life spans. But despite the gains—and numerous scientific studies indicating vaccine safety—a growing movement of parents remains fearful of vaccines. And in some American communities, significant numbers of parents have been rejecting vaccines altogether, raising new concerns about the return of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough.
In The Vaccine War, airing Tuesday, April 27, 2010, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE lays bare the science of vaccine safety and examines the increasingly bitter debate between the public health establishment and a formidable populist coalition of parents, celebrities, politicians and activists who are armed with the latest social media tools, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and are determined to resist pressure from the medical and public health establishments to vaccinate, despite established scientific consensus about vaccine safety.
“Scientifically, I think the matter is settled,” says Anders Hviid, an epidemiologist at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark. In one of the largest and most comprehensive epidemiological studies available, Hviid and colleagues analyzed data on more than a half million children and found no link between the MMR “triple shot” for measles, mumps and rubella and an increased rate of autism—a link that’s been strongly asserted for years by anti-vaccine activists. Similar epidemiological studies in Denmark also failed to reveal a link between the mercury preservative thimerosal and autism. In fact, around the world, peer-reviewed epidemiological studies have found no link between autism and either the MMR shot or thimerosal.
But vaccine skeptics like celebrity Jenny McCarthy, whose son, Evan, was diagnosed with autism following a series of vaccinations, including MMR, are convinced that further study into the other 15 pediatric vaccines and their additives will ultimately reveal a link. “Something happened. And when I say something, I mean a behavior, a trigger,” McCarthy tells FRONTLINE. “Is it mercury? Is it the schedule? Is there just too many? My answer to people and what I’ve been telling them is, ‘It’s all of the above.’ We don’t know for sure, which is why we keep saying, ‘Study it.’”
Further vaccine safety research is what businessman J.B. Handley, who founded the autism support group Generation Rescue, has been calling for, too. Handley tells FRONTLINE he has little doubt that vaccines are responsible. “There is no real-world study that shows me that those six vaccines didn’t cause my son’s autism.”
Nowhere has The Vaccine War grown more heated than in Ashland, Ore.—an area that FRONTLINE learns is of high concern to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With an estimated quarter of the town’s children entering kindergarten not fully immunized, Ashland is one of the least vaccinated places in America. Despite the best efforts of local pediatricians like Dr. Donna Bradshaw-Walters, many parents are simply not convinced that vaccines do more good than harm, and they’ve been using Oregon’s religious and personal-belief exemption to get out of the state vaccine mandate. “I think a child’s immune system is so immature,” says Jennifer Margulis, an Ashland writer and mother of four who chooses vaccine exemption. “If you read the list of ingredients about what you’re putting intramuscularly into your child, it’s scary.”
According to public health workers, however, Margulis’ decision puts the entire community at risk. Vaccines don’t work for everyone, and in some kids the effects wear off, so it’s only when everyone—or almost everyone—is immunized that “herd immunity” is effective. “There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who cannot be vaccinated,” says Dr. Paul Offit, the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the inventor of a vaccine for rotavirus. “They’re getting chemotherapy for their cancers, or they’re getting immunosuppressive therapy. They depend on those around them to be vaccinated.”
Bioethicist Art Caplan argues that society has the right to coerce its parents to vaccinate their children even if vaccines carry a small risk. “Parents don’t have unlimited rights with respect to the welfare of their children. You can’t kill them. You can’t put them at risk of fatal disease. You can’t put them at risk of devastating disability.”
Surveys reveal that America’s conversation about vaccines is complex, involving not only medical risks and benefits but also ideological beliefs about parental choice and the limits of government. “This is true even of individuals who see the benefits of vaccines as substantial,” political scientist Hank Jenkins-Smith tells FRONTLINE. “They still want it to be a choice. They don’t want it to be compulsory.” Government control over individual choice is another factor fueling the anti-vaccine backlash, despite the peer-reviewed science that vaccines are safe.
“People now have a way to get the information they couldn’t before, to communicate it to other people, and to have a robust public debate that is not controlled by money or political power or by government policy,” says Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center. “Physicians are going to have to get over the idea that they tell people what to do, and people are going to do it without questioning.”
Audience Engagement: Beginning one week before broadcast, Wednesday, April 21, visitors to FRONTLINE’s web site can interact with medical experts who will be responding to comments and answering questions. Visitors can also take a survey featuring five key questions about their attitudes toward vaccines, and find out how well their responses match responses from a nationwide survey.
The Vaccine War is a FRONTLINE co-production with the Palfreman Film Group. The writer, producer and director is Jon Palfreman. FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and described for people who are blind or visually impaired by the Media Access Group at WGBH. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. The senior producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Public Invited: NVAC H1N1 Vaccine Safety Report Conference Call
Public Invited: NVAC H1N1 Vaccine Safety Report Conference Call
Friday, April 23, 2010 3 - 5 pm EDT
Click HERE for more details
Participants call-in: 1-888-677-1385 Passcode: NVAC
3:00 pm
Introduction (5 minutes)
Dr. Gus Birkhead (NVAC Chair)
3:05 pm
Report of H1N1 Vaccine Safety Risk Assessment Working Group (VSRAWG)(15 minutes)
Dr. Marie McCormick
3:25 pm
Public Comment (10 minutes)
3:35 pm
Summary / wrap-up / next steps (5 min)
Dr. Gus Birkhead (NVAC Chair)
3:40 pm
Adjourn
Questions: e-mail: nvpo@hhs.gov or call (202) 690-5566 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (202) 690-5566 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
NVAC Website: http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/nvac/
Saturday, April 17, 2010
FDA Shuts Down Common Infant Vaccine After Startling Discovery
The FDA Shuts Down Common Infant Vaccine After Startling Discovery (source: CNN March 22, 2010)
One million U.S. children, and about 30 million worldwide, have already received GlaxoSmithKline's Rotarix vaccine. Now a research team has discovered it is contaminated with "a substantial amount" of DNA from a pig virus. What is pig virus DNA doing in a vaccine intended to prevent rotavirus disease, which causes severe diarrhea and dehydration? It's anybody's guess, although CNN reported that GlaxoSmitthKline detected the substance in the cell bank and the seed used to make the vaccine, "suggesting its presence from the early stages of vaccine development." It is actually common for vaccines to contain various animal matter, including foreign animal tissues containing genetic material (DNA/RNA), but even FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg told CNN: "It [Pig virus DNA] should not be in this vaccine product and we want to understand how it got there. It's not an easy call and we spent many long hours debating the pros and cons but, because we have an alternative product and because the background rates of this disease are not so severe in this country, we felt that the judicious thing to do was to take a pause, to really ask the critical questions about what this material was doing in the vaccine, how it got there." History has shown that it can indeed be very dangerous when an animal virus unintentionally enters the vaccine supply. During the 1950s and 1960s, the polio vaccine, which is still given in the United States, typically four times during a child's first 16 months of life, was widely contaminated with the monkey virus, SV40, which had gotten into the vaccine during the manufacturing process (monkey kidney cells, where SV40 thrived, were used to develop polio vaccines). In lab tests, the virus was found to cause several different types of cancer, including brain cancer, and now SV40 is showing up in a variety of human cancers such as lung, brain, bone and lymphatic. According to the authors of The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed, leading scientists and government officials turned their heads to repeated studies showing that SV40 was in the vaccine, and even today some well-known agencies are still dismissing study results. The virus is even showing up in children too young to have received the contaminated vaccine, and some experts are now suggesting the contaminated virus may have been in the polio vaccine up until as late as 1999. Disturbing Findings in Rotarix and Two Other Common Childhood Vaccines
Dr. Eric Delwart is the researcher who, along with colleagues, made the discovery of contamination in Rotarix. Their intent was reportedly to "show that live attenuated vaccine only contained the expected viral genomes and no other," but what they found told a different story. Using new technology to test eight infectious attenuated viral vaccines, the results showed three of the vaccines contained "unexpected viral sequences": A measles vaccine was found to contain low levels of the retrovirus avian leukosis virus Rotateq, Merck's rotavirus vaccine, was found to contain a virus similar to simian (monkey) retrovirus Rotarix (GlaxoSmithKine's rotavirus vaccine) was found to contain "significant levels" of porcine cirovirus 1 So in their tests, nearly 40 percent of the vaccines they tested contained viral contaminants. The implications of these findings on the alleged safety of the vaccine supply remains to be seen, but clearly there is contamination occurring that was a complete surprise to researchers, health officials and vaccine manufacturers alike. As Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), said in her commentary on the Rotarix contamination issue: "There are lots of questions about how the manufacturer of Rotarix vaccine and the FDA both missed the pig virus DNA contaminating the original seed stock and all doses of Rotarix vaccine given to more than one million American children in the past few years. Is there state-of-the-art technology that is being used by private laboratories but not by drug companies and the FDA? Why did the independent team of scientists, who found the contamination, notify the vaccine manufacturer first rather than also immediately reporting their finding directly to the FDA? What about the significance of finding bird viral DNA in measles vaccine and the monkey viral DNA in RotaTeq vaccine?" There are clearly a lot of unanswered questions right now. At the very least, it certainly makes you wonder what other "unknown" contaminants are lurking in vaccines. At worst, we could be injecting children with substances that could potentially cause serious health problems down the road.
Animal Ingredients Common in Vaccines
You should know that it is very common for vaccine manufacturers to use cells from animals and birds in their manufacturing process. To put this in perspective, Barbara Loe Fisher has explained what animal material is par for the course in manufacturing the Rotarix vaccine for your children: "Rotarix is a genetically engineered vaccine that GSK created by isolating human rotavirus strain infecting a child in Cincinnati and using African Green monkey kidney cells to produce the original viral seed stock from which all Rotarix vaccine has been made. In the FDA licensing process, Rotarix had to meet certain FDA standards, that included demonstrating the vaccine was not contaminated with, for example TSE (Transmissable Spongiform Encephalopathy or "mad cow" disease, a brain wasting disease) or with cow viruses because bovine (cow) serum was used to prepare the original viral seed stock. Porcine trypsin, an enzyme in the pancreatic juice of a pig, was also used to make the viral seed stock."
One million U.S. children, and about 30 million worldwide, have already received GlaxoSmithKline's Rotarix vaccine. Now a research team has discovered it is contaminated with "a substantial amount" of DNA from a pig virus. What is pig virus DNA doing in a vaccine intended to prevent rotavirus disease, which causes severe diarrhea and dehydration? It's anybody's guess, although CNN reported that GlaxoSmitthKline detected the substance in the cell bank and the seed used to make the vaccine, "suggesting its presence from the early stages of vaccine development." It is actually common for vaccines to contain various animal matter, including foreign animal tissues containing genetic material (DNA/RNA), but even FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg told CNN: "It [Pig virus DNA] should not be in this vaccine product and we want to understand how it got there. It's not an easy call and we spent many long hours debating the pros and cons but, because we have an alternative product and because the background rates of this disease are not so severe in this country, we felt that the judicious thing to do was to take a pause, to really ask the critical questions about what this material was doing in the vaccine, how it got there." History has shown that it can indeed be very dangerous when an animal virus unintentionally enters the vaccine supply. During the 1950s and 1960s, the polio vaccine, which is still given in the United States, typically four times during a child's first 16 months of life, was widely contaminated with the monkey virus, SV40, which had gotten into the vaccine during the manufacturing process (monkey kidney cells, where SV40 thrived, were used to develop polio vaccines). In lab tests, the virus was found to cause several different types of cancer, including brain cancer, and now SV40 is showing up in a variety of human cancers such as lung, brain, bone and lymphatic. According to the authors of The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed, leading scientists and government officials turned their heads to repeated studies showing that SV40 was in the vaccine, and even today some well-known agencies are still dismissing study results. The virus is even showing up in children too young to have received the contaminated vaccine, and some experts are now suggesting the contaminated virus may have been in the polio vaccine up until as late as 1999. Disturbing Findings in Rotarix and Two Other Common Childhood Vaccines
Dr. Eric Delwart is the researcher who, along with colleagues, made the discovery of contamination in Rotarix. Their intent was reportedly to "show that live attenuated vaccine only contained the expected viral genomes and no other," but what they found told a different story. Using new technology to test eight infectious attenuated viral vaccines, the results showed three of the vaccines contained "unexpected viral sequences": A measles vaccine was found to contain low levels of the retrovirus avian leukosis virus Rotateq, Merck's rotavirus vaccine, was found to contain a virus similar to simian (monkey) retrovirus Rotarix (GlaxoSmithKine's rotavirus vaccine) was found to contain "significant levels" of porcine cirovirus 1 So in their tests, nearly 40 percent of the vaccines they tested contained viral contaminants. The implications of these findings on the alleged safety of the vaccine supply remains to be seen, but clearly there is contamination occurring that was a complete surprise to researchers, health officials and vaccine manufacturers alike. As Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), said in her commentary on the Rotarix contamination issue: "There are lots of questions about how the manufacturer of Rotarix vaccine and the FDA both missed the pig virus DNA contaminating the original seed stock and all doses of Rotarix vaccine given to more than one million American children in the past few years. Is there state-of-the-art technology that is being used by private laboratories but not by drug companies and the FDA? Why did the independent team of scientists, who found the contamination, notify the vaccine manufacturer first rather than also immediately reporting their finding directly to the FDA? What about the significance of finding bird viral DNA in measles vaccine and the monkey viral DNA in RotaTeq vaccine?" There are clearly a lot of unanswered questions right now. At the very least, it certainly makes you wonder what other "unknown" contaminants are lurking in vaccines. At worst, we could be injecting children with substances that could potentially cause serious health problems down the road.
Animal Ingredients Common in Vaccines
You should know that it is very common for vaccine manufacturers to use cells from animals and birds in their manufacturing process. To put this in perspective, Barbara Loe Fisher has explained what animal material is par for the course in manufacturing the Rotarix vaccine for your children: "Rotarix is a genetically engineered vaccine that GSK created by isolating human rotavirus strain infecting a child in Cincinnati and using African Green monkey kidney cells to produce the original viral seed stock from which all Rotarix vaccine has been made. In the FDA licensing process, Rotarix had to meet certain FDA standards, that included demonstrating the vaccine was not contaminated with, for example TSE (Transmissable Spongiform Encephalopathy or "mad cow" disease, a brain wasting disease) or with cow viruses because bovine (cow) serum was used to prepare the original viral seed stock. Porcine trypsin, an enzyme in the pancreatic juice of a pig, was also used to make the viral seed stock."
Monday, April 12, 2010
The Vaccine War
The Vaccine War
A PBS Frontline program featuring Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Jay Gordon 
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Sept 21, The Science, Ethics, Politics of Vaccine mandates
The Center for Bioethics
of the University of Pennsylvania
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
The University of Pennsylvania Health System and the
Society for Health Care Epidemiology of America Present a Conference on: The Science, Ethics and Politics of Vaccine Mandates
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
9:00am-4:00pm University of Pennsylvania campus
Bio medical Research Building Auditorium
421 Curie Boulevard
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
<http://www.med.upenn.edu/bgs/maps_directions.shtml> You MUST pre-register for this conference with:
Janice Pringle
Email: <jpringlemail.med.upenn.edu>
or call
The Center for Bioethics at 215-898-7136. Patricia R. Schissel, LMSW
President, AHA
Asperger Syndrome and High Functioning Autism Association (AHA) Inc.
PO Box 916
Bethpage, NY 11714
P/F:888.918,9198
www.ahaNY.org__._,_.___
May 15, The Indigo Festival - A Celebration of Holistic Pregnancy and Parenting - Lake Hopatcong, NJ
The Indigo Festival
Hosted by Family Chiropractic Center
A Celebration of Holistic Pregnancy and Parenting
Share in a day of learning and fun for the whole family!
www.HartmanIndigoFestival.info
Kids: Free
Admission!
Adults: $5
An ICPA &
NJ Coalition for Vaccination Choice
Fundraiser!
May 15th, 2010 11am-4pm
Camp Jefferson - 81 Weldon Road, Lake Hopatcong, NJ 07849
DJ * Face Painting & Balloon Entertainer * Carnival Games * Crafts
Spinal Health Checks for All * Holistic Health Assessments
Group Weight Loss Hypnosis Session * Healthy Snacks
Our Professional Speaker Line-up: TBA
Come and Meet Our Area’s Top Holistic Practitioners and Advocates:
Midwives, doulas, nutritionists, naturopaths, homeopaths, chiropractors, prenatal yoga instructors, holistic counselors, holistic medical practitioners, organic farmers, green living advocates and much more!
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