However, previously secret government minutes reveal Professor McDevitt was himself a member of a 1988 government safety panel  which approved Pluserix MMR as safe for vaccine manufacturer Smith Kline & French Laboratories (see first .pdf attached). [May 2007] GMC Challenged On MMR Inquiry Chief's Vaccine Firm Links

"Professor McDevitt,.....attended meetings that discussed warnings from other countries about an early form of the triple jab, using the Urabe strain of mumps virus, which caused encephalitis and meningitis. Despite warnings and the fact that this vaccine had already been withdrawn in Canada, the Urabe-containing jab was introduced in the UK in 1988.  Some of the 12 children whose medical history featured in the controversial 1998 Lancet paper, drawn up by Dr Wakefield and his colleagues and which suggested a possible link between the jab and bowel disease and regressive autism, had received the Urabe-strain vaccine - as indeed had some of those children in the high court litigation with manufacturers." [June 2007 Private Eye] MMR Conflict of Interest Zone

The person who commissioned Deer was Paul Nuki, Sunday Times' sometime Head of Newsroom investigations and "Focus" editor. Paul Nuki is son of Professor George Nuki. Professor George Nuki in 1987 sat on the Committee on Safety of Medicines when the CSM was considering Glaxo company Smith Kline & French Laboratories' Pluserix MMR vaccine for safety approval. ......sitting on the CSM with Professor George Nuki was Professor Sir Roy Meadow and Professor Sir David Hull............it was Professor Sir David Hull in 1998 who, as chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, started the attacks on Wakefield's work 
    As Chairman of the JCVI, Professor Sir David Hull could have taken action to deal with the issues over the MMR and protect British children
    In 1998 Professor Sir David Hull wrote (on home headed notepaper) to Dean Zuckerman of The Royal Free, suggesting the Royal Free Hospital's work was unethical research without clinical justification (wrongfully, as the public would have learnt if The Observer had been reporting the current GMC hearings into the Wakefield case)
    Despite his attacks on Wakefield's work, two years later in 2000, it was Professor Sir David Hull who rewrote the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health ethical guidelines to permit research on children where there was no clinical benefit (albeit in The Royal Free's case all the investigations were clinically justified)  [April 2008] MMR/AUTISM & THE TAMING OF THE BRITISH MEDIA--Clifford Miller

The chairman of the government committee that approved the inoculation is receiving financial support for his work from a com­pany involved in its manufacture. Professor Michael Langman, who heads the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, gets funding from Merck Sharp and Dohme (MSD) for his medical research at Birmingham University. [Media Aug 16, 2004] Five-in-one jab adviser has links to vaccine firm

Four leading Midland doctors who deemed the controversial MMR vaccine safe have links to the drug giants who make or supply the jab......Professor Michael Langman from Birmingham University is the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.  His team received research support from Merck Sharp and Dohme, which manufactures MMR vaccine. [Media Feb 29 2004] MMR docs' links with drugs firms

"Critics have long argued that patient information suffers because of a conflict between the MCA public health role and its role in promoting the UK pharmaceutical industry (it is totally funded by the industry)."--Media Feb 2003

"In the latest annual report for the "Medicines Act 1968 Advisory Bodies", she (Miller) lists five "non-personal" interests — payments which benefit her department rather than herself personally. They are grants from Baxter Healthcare, Wyeth Lederle Vaccines, Chiron Biocine, and SmithKline Beecham and "CMI testing in adolescent sera", courtesy of Aventis Pasteur."--Private Eye 

"Professor  David Elliman, whose study said fears of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism were unfounded, admitted that he and Dr Helen Bedford had been given money by drugs giants SmithKline Beecham and Pasteur Merieux Merck Sharp & Dohme. Their report, MMR Vaccine - Worries Are Not Justified, is published in the current issue of the medical journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, and was used by the government to reiterate its view that the vaccine is safe."--Media    

Dr Norman Begg, consultant epidemiologist of the Public Health Laboratory Service (1989), Director of Medical affairs, GlaxoSmith-Kline (2001).

"Asking the CDC to look into vaccine safety is like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop."--Dr Bernard Rimland Ph D http://autism.com/ari/editorials/explosion.html

"Even though SV-40 was being screened out, scientists such as John Martin, a professor of pathology at the University of Southern California, warned that other monkey viruses could be dangerous. But government officials rebuffed Martin's attempt to research those risks back in 1978 and again in 1995 when he was denied federal funding and vaccine samples he needed to investigate the effects of simian cytomegalovirus (SCMV), an organism that his studies indicate causes neurological disorders in the human brain."--Money Magazine http://www.whale.to/vaccines/money_mag.html

Neil Halsey MD

"You have a situation in which scientists working on vaccine research are also Government regulators."--Dr J Morris (former FDA)

"About six times a year, Merck and Co. pays Dr. Lawrence Frenkel as much as $750 to give talks on vaccines, including the chickenpox vaccine that Merck makes.  Frenkel is one of five members of the state Immunization Advisory Committee who have disclosed on reporting forms that they have financial interests in Merck."--Media

"Today we have a system in which vaccine production by the pharmaceutical companies is largely self-regulated. Of course these companies are interested in profits from their products which, in itself, is not wrong. However, when arbitrary decisions in the mandating of vaccines are made by the government bureaucracies, which are highly partisan to the pharmaceuticals, with no recourse open to parents, we have all the potential ingredients for a tragedy of historical proportions."--Harold Buttram MD

"Wyeth Lederle had paid Dr. Edwards $255,023 per year from 1996 to 1998 for the study of pneumococcal vaccines (i.e. Prevnar). Edwards is also one of fifteen full-time members of FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, the committee that advises the FDA on the licensing of new vaccines......Rennels was instrumental in getting RotaShield to market and is now involved in Prevnar. Her university receives a total of over $2.5 million from various drug and vaccine companies including Wyeth Lederle, Prevnar’s manufacturer. She is also one of the twelve members of the Committee on Infectious Diseases, the committee that makes vaccine recommendations as part of the American Academy of Pediatrics.....This doctor (Dr. Jerome Klein) has been employed by the major vaccine manufacturers to testify against vaccine injured children. He is also chief editor of pneumo.com the website paid for by Wyeth Lederle to sponsor Prevnar. Furthermore, Klein holds a position on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, the committee that recommends products for universal vaccination."--Michael Horwin, MA"

"I have minutes from a CDC Study Group Meeting on the Hepatitis B vaccine held in March, 1997. ....It should be noted that the afternoon session of this meeting was chaired by Dr. Robert Sharrar of Merck."--Betty D. Fluck

"The (Illinois) department followed the recommendation of a panel of experts, its Immunization Advisory Committee, while rejecting the advice of others who thought the decision should be left to parents and pediatricians. But in what critics consider a conflict of interest, 5 of the committee's 18 members have financial ties to Merck, which makes the chickenpox vaccine. Two members of the committee have given talks for Merck, receiving up to $750 per speech. A third member directs a nonprofit group that has received $20,000 in grant money from the company. And two other members own stock in Merck, including one who has owned as much as $16,000 worth."--Media Jan 2002

Dr Offit works for Merck and has a patent on a Rotavirus vaccine
"If they were willing to look at all the studies that were done with vaccines, they would find that they are, I think without question, the safest, best-tested thing we put into our bodies," says Offit. "I think they have a better safety record than vitamins.  (CBS) 60 MinutesOctober 20, 2004

"Take this classic sequence from the Senate hearing on April 6th this year about MMR and autism. Professor O’Leary from Ireland was confirming that his evidence proved that Dr Andrew Wakefield was right. Our friendly Dr Paul Offit showed his true colours with this response: "He cannot have found something that suggests a link between autism and vaccines, because of the possible consequences of such a finding." Consequences to what? Paul Offit’s cushy job flying around the world teaching doctors vaccines are safe? …… Paul Offit’s pharmaceutical shares?…….. Paul Offit’s professional reputation? Paul Offit’s self-esteem? ……… Paul Offit’s……… vaccine patent?  What is worse, he, and most others representing the pharmaceutical companies which keep their families well heeled, have no knowledge or interest in the hundreds of vaccine disasters previously written up in their own skeleton ridden history books. If you showed them, they either wouldn’t believe it, or they would laugh and say "But that was then…. We know everything now."---Hilary Butler

"Asking the public health community to investigate the role of vaccines in the development of autism is like asking the tobacco industry to investigate the link between lung cancer and smoking," Rick Rollens     

"No infectious disease specialist will be able to serve on this committee -- we all take money from pharmaceutical companies! "---ILLINOIS IMMUNIZATION ADVISORY COMMITTEE PLAN TO CONTINUE "CONFLICTS OF INTEREST" THWARTED

3. Politicians/government funded by vaccine/drug companies:

An example of why Congressman Henry Waxman supports vaccines.

"A leading Labour MSP......Dr Richard Simpson is paid up to £5000 a year by a trust funded by the company which makes the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.......Dr Richard Simpson is paid up to £5000 a year by a trust funded by the company which makes the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine."--Daily Mail

"Three months ago we announced a partnership with the Wellcome Trust to invest over £1 billion to re-equip university science in Britain, the largest ever investment in Britain’s science base. Having received an overwhelming response from universities to our new University Challenge Fund we are now inviting further private sector involvement."—Chancellor’s statement Nov 4, 1998

4. Vaccine Experts bought up by vaccine companies (and used as expert witnesses):

CASE No. 82-1232, Cossette Krause, vs F.K. Abbousy, MD et al (State of Ohio), transcipt of videotape deposition of Dr Edward Mortimer September 6, 1984..  On page 11 reads the following:

"Several years ago, because of the increasing amount of litigations over DTP, members of the so-called Red Book Committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics agreed in a sense that we would sort of divide up the cases to try to help the manufacturers in these lawsuits, and therefore I and a number of my colleagues agreed to serve as expert witnesses."

"And then the industry started buying up the experts," he contends, citing the example of James Cherry, a widely recognized pertussis expert who has served on both the ACIP and the AAP's vaccine advisory committee."----Congressional Quarterly Researcher

"Regarding Neal Halsey http://www.vaccinesafety:  There were two meetings on vaccines and diabetes. There was no consensus reached in either meeting however people are misrepresenting the truth by  claiming there was a consensus. Neal Halsey appeared to admit under oath that the people at the Johns Hopkins meeting told him they refused to sign a consensus statement refuting my findings. Neal Halsey continues to claim a consensus however. It was brought up under oath that Neal Halsey's  vaccine organization was receiving in excess of  $100,000 from vaccine manufacturers and the conference was not an objective conference."--Bart Classen

Cherry, a physician and professor of pediatrics at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a widely recognized pertussiss expert who has been a leader on advisory committees that help frame immunization policy for the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control. Back in 1979, at a symposium, he said, "All physicians are aware that pertussis vaccine occasionally produces severe reactions and that these may be associated with permanent sequellae (complications caused by the vaccine) or even death." But by 1990, Cherry had changed his mind, proclaiming in the Journal of the American Medical Association that severe brain damage caused by pertussis vaccine was nothing but "a myth." From 1980 through 1988, Cherry got about $400,000 in unrestricted grants that he termed "gifts" from Lederle. From 1988 through 1993, he was given $146,000 by Lederle for pertussis research, and from 1986 through 1992, UCLA received $654,418 from Lederle for pertussis research. Additionally, drug manufacturers paid Cherry and UCLA $34,058 for his testimony as an expert witness in 15 DPT lawsuits brought against the companies. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Flats/6997/money.html

"Dr. Offit lists that he is a consultant to Merck. Dr. Offit shares the patent on the Rotavirus vaccine in development by Merck and lists a $350,000 grant from Merck for Rotavirus vaccine development."--Committee of Government Reform

"Dr. Samuel Katz of Duke University  has served as chair of both the ACIP and the Red Book committees. He co-chairs a group called the Vaccine Initiative, which is an information and advocacy group that benefited from start-up funds from at least six vaccine manufacturers. He is listed as an advisory board member to the Immunization Action Coalition (which includes the Coalition for Hepatitis B), an advocacy group that receives funding from several vaccine makers, including SmithKline Beecham, Merck and Wyeth-Lederle........Dr. Neal Halsey of Johns Hopkins University http://www.vaccinesafety. Like Katz, he is a vaccine pioneer and served on ACIP and the Red Book committees. He, too, is an advisor to the Immunization Action Coalition and the Hepatitis B Coalition. Halsey is also director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety, which he founded at Johns Hopkins to provide a forum on vaccine safety, among other things. According to a Johns Hopkins' spokesperson, the institute receives funds from Merck, SmithKline Beecham, North American Vaccines, Connaught/Pasteur Merrieux and Wyeth-Lederle."----Nicholas Regush ABCNEWS.com

In a May 8, 1991 letter to Secretary Sullivan, the National Vaccine Information Center had asked Secretary Sullivan to remove two prominent physicians from the Immunization Practices Advisory Committee (ACIP), the Department of Health and Human Services advisory committee which makes national vaccine policy and is responsible for creating the new DPT guidelines. NVIC asked for the resignations of Dr. James Cherry of UCLA, and Dr. Edward Mortimer of Case Western University, citing their conflict of interest for receiving MORE than $800,000 in expert witness, consulting fees, and research grants from DPT vaccine manufacturers. In the Department of Health and Human Services reply, Assistant Secretary Dr. James Mason gave no indication that DHHS would consider removing Cherry or Mortimer or any other doctor on the vaccine policy-making committee who has benefited financially from vaccine manufacturers. If this is not a conflict of interest, what is it?
          There are only five doctors that reside on the policy-making committee and two of those had received financial assistance from the pharmaceutical companies. Is there something wrong with this picture?

Dr Cherry http://consumerlawpage.com/article/vaccine.shtml
http://pages.prodigy.com/gval/conflict.htm

Critique of government funded studies--Harris Coulter Ph.D.

"Medical Ethics and Financial Disclosures," Vaccine Information & Awareness (VIA), via@access1.net, July 15, 1998, 12:04:30.64; "Conflict of Interest May Taint Research Studies," (VIA), August 1, 1998, 11:09 a.m., http://www.access1.net/via. 

Some of the pitfalls of relying on vaccine experts are described in  a NY Times article on a military anthrax vaccine

"The vaccination lobby shamelessly takes all the children of this world as hostages to still their greed for money and power. They relentlessly abuse our compassion for the weaker and our concern about health to promote their giga-business. No matter what. No matter how many more vaccine victims will suffer death or side-effects. No matter how many financial resources this strategy devours at the expense of essential social investments like housing and employment. No matter what. Shocking! There is no excuse for this crime.  Just as shocking is the observation that (health) policy is no longer under local, democratic control. Everything is set up and organised with scrutiny at the highest, international level by those who take profit from it: the pharmaceutical industry, the financial world, politicians."---Kris Gaublomme MD

Tedd Koren, D.C., quoted Barbara Fisher, who served 10 years on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee trying to reform the health care system herself, as revealing more than presidential election lobby monies: ‘We have bad science and bad medicine translated into law to ensure that vaccine manufacturers make big profits, that career bureaucrats at the Public Health Service meet the mass vaccination goals promised to politicians funding their budgets, and pediatricians have a steady flow of patients...As the drug companies have often stated in meetings I have attended, if a vaccine they produce is not mandated to be used on a mass basis, they do not recoup their R & D costs and don’t make the profit they want...official studies of vaccine risk have been designed and conducted by physicians who sit on vaccine policy-making committees at the Centers for Disease Control...some of whom receive money from vaccine manufacturers for their universities and for testifying as expert witnesses in vaccine-injury cases. And others are federal employees with an eye on career advancement within HHS and a future job with a vaccine manufacturer after retirement from public service" (Well Mind Association October 1993).

"When I look at it," Fisher says, "what I see is allopathic medicine at war with the other modalities. Homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic are perceived as challenging the basic premise of allopathic medicine, which is that germs are the ultimate cause of illness and must be destroyed--in this case, by vaccines.....Both Fisher and Coulter agree that not only are vaccines the sacred cow of the public health system, they have also become the golden calf. What that means is money. Fisher points out that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with an annual budget of around $360 billion, is the most powerful and wealthiest federal agency in the country.
        .....In the United States there are two main vaccine policy-making groups, the Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) under HHS. ACIP makes recommendations for vaccine policy. Fisher says these recommendations turn into mandates "because state health officials automatically turn them into state law. In most states," she says, "[when it comes to public health] you no longer even have a vote by the legislature. All the state health departments have to do is issue a regulation, and it automatically becomes a law."
        Fisher says: "For 16 years I have sat in rooms with these officials, both at scientific conferences and government meetings. I was appointed to the Vaccine Advisory Committee for four years under HHS. I was the token consumer representative." What she observed was lack of oversight of this huge enterprise. "You have the highly funded HHS. You have the federal health infrastructure that funds the state public-health infrastructure. Together they have decided they are going to use vaccines to eradicate disease-causing microorganisms from Earth. Then there are the drug companies that manufacture the vaccines; they have a very profitable relationship with FDA and CDC. Everyone is committed to the same premise. What we are trying to make the public realize is that no money whatsoever has been portioned to independent researchers who work outside this very profitable, self-reinforcing loop."---Franklin Cameron

"Lemon S, Thomas DL. Vaccines to prevent viral hepatitis. N Engl J Med 1997;336:196-204. Dr. Lemon received grants from SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals."--NEJM

"Some of the ties to the pharmaceutical companies were revealed. The government reform committee has requested all records indicating travel expenses, honorariums paid, speaker fees paid, etc. to any FDA, CDC officials by pharmaceutical companies. The Advisory Committee on Childhood Vaccines, which makes recommendations regarding vaccine compensation, is made up of 9 voting members. Three are lawyers, three are doctors and three members of the general public. One of the lawyers is REQUIRED under the Compensation Act of 1986 to be a lawyer representing the PHARMACEUTICAL companies. Another Committee called the Immunization Practice Committee, which recommends which vaccines and when they should be given, is made up of 24 people. Eleven (11) of the 24 receive money from the pharmaceutical companies!"--Dawn Richardson http://www.planetchiropractic.com/vaccine.htm

5. Industry places its own men in disease charities:
"The National Foundation For Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) used the "The March Of Dimes" to fund its polio research which lead to the Salk vaccine field trials in 1954. The Director Of Polio Research was Dr. Henry Kumm. According to the brief sketch in American Journal of Digestive Diseases, May 1953, Dr. Kumm was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. He came to the U.S. via Britain and became an American citizen in 1945. He had spent 23 years on the staff of the Rockefeller Foundation for Medical Research before joining the NFIP in July, 1951. In May 1953, Dr. Kumm replaced Dr. Harry M. Weaver as Director Of Polio Research at NFIP. During World War II he had served as civilian consultant to the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army in Italy, directing field studies for the use of DDT against malarial mosquitoes in the marshes near Rome and Naples. This appears to be a conflict of interest for this key player in polio research."--Jim West http://www.geocities.com/harpub/pol_all.htm

6. Industry funding disease charities:
"Last night the National Meningitis Trust, sponsored by Wyeth, was drawn into the controversy when it refused to disclose how much money it received from the giant drug company."--Media report on meningitis C vaccine

"The major charities have close interlocking interests with the cancer drug, chemotherapy and gene therapy, industries. These charities receive substantial funding from the drug industries and operate as multimillion pound corporations fronting for these industries."--Samuel Epstein MD http://www.preventcancer.com/  

"You think that nonprofit organizations just give away their stamps of approval on products? Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $600,000 to the American Heart Association for the right to display AHA's name and logo in ads for its cholesterol-lowering drug Pravachol. Smith Kline Beecham paid the American Cancer Society $1 million for the right to use its logo in ads for Beecham's Nicoderm CQ and Nicorette anti-smoking ads."--Book

HEAL is the only not-for-profit AIDS organisation that does not accept grants or funding from the US Government or pharmaceutical companies.

"The Imperial Cancer Research Fund writes--"One of the biggest myths in recent years is that there is a cancer epidemic by exposure to radiation, pollution, pesticides and food additives.  the truth is that these factors have very little to do with the majority of cancers in this country.  In fact food additives may have a protective effect---particulary against stomach cancer."      Decades ago they (cancer charities) were relatively independent from industry...Now they are all but departments of large pharaceutical companies.   The Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF)..is a case in point.  While most lay people imagine that it is simply a worthy charity collecting money to research cancer, few will understand that it is itself a mutli-million pound corporation which hardly makes a move independently of professional science, or its industrial pharmaceutical patrons and backers.  Through its council and its benefactors, the ICRF is run by, and mainly for, the profit of the pharmaceutical companies the very corporations whose products would have to be investigated for any wide-ranging investigation of cancerand the environment."--Martin Walker writing in the Ecologist vol 28 No 2. Matin Walker is the author of Dirty Medicine.  (ICRF http://www.icnet.uk/ )

"I wrote a chapter from our book I published (Toxic Metal Syndrome) in the Townsend Letter on aluminium and promptly a letter came from the aluminium industry of America and that they protested out statements and gave a lot of public relations nonsense in their letter, and they lied, they just outright lied. You don’t hear much about aluminium from, for instance, the Alzheimer’s Disease Association because that Association takes money from the aluminium industry......Edward Truschke, the executive director of the Alzheimer's Association headquarters in Chicago, in response to our multiple inquiries, finally admitted that his organization has received unrestricted grant monies from the Aluminum Association of Canada (ALCAN) and from the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). He did not acknowledge, but we are aware anyway, that the international Alzheimer's disease medical meeting held in July 1992, in Italy, was sponsored in part by the Aluminum Association of Canada."----Dr Casdorph, M.D. & Dr Morton Walker 

"There is no direct disclosure of the interrelationships between NAAR and the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes for Health, who work closely with the drug industry, but in NAAR literature one observes references to NIH funding of NAAR projects and a workshop sponsored jointly by NAAR and CDC ( http://www.naar.org). The relationship between NAAR and the drug industry is evidenced in the Winter 1998 issue of NAARRATIVE, which displays front-page coverage of the awarding of a "NAAR/Bristol-Myers Squibb Research Fellowship in Autism and Neuropharmacology."  Laura Reude

Jon Rappoport ( http://home.earthlink.net/~alto/     http://www.jonrappoport.com/) reviews the Merrow Report (featured on P), which reveals that Ciba-Geigy funded CHADD (Children with Attention Deficit Disorder) with $818,000, and that the U.S. Education also funded CHADD with $750,000 to produce a video (Facing the Challenge of ADD) which promoted Ritalin. The CHADD video was circulated throughout the U.S. Educational system. The CHADD video devoted only 20 seconds to Ritalin's adverse effects. It included interviews of parents who were satisfied with the effects of Ritalin on their children, yet, amazingly, all of these interviewed parents were CHADD board members. http://www3.bcity.com/harpub/

Election Gives Drug Industry New Influence

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