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Conflicts of Interest
Profit motive can affect mass vaccine policies
by Doug Collins
Overtreatment in the medical establishment is a well-known fact. Forexample, individual doctors have a tendency to overprescribe evensensitive treatments like elective surgery if they are rewarded forthis by the insurance system they work under. That's exactly why HMOsor "managed care" facilities succeed in containing healthcare costs:they remove the profit motive from the doctor.
Vaccines also seem to be an awfully sensitive practice, so at firstit's a little hard to imagine that anyone would have a motive toexaggerate their benefits and suppress information about their harmfuleffects. But vaccine manufacturers are private companies and privatecompanies always have a profit motive. Although many companies maytake part in activities that benefit the public (and vaccines docertainly have some public benefit), companies also have a clear goalof making money. In large-scale public healthcare, this can alsoresult in overtreatment, such as the overuse of vaccines.
In the year 2000, the US House of Representatives Committee onGovernment Reform held hearings to examine conflicts of interest inthe two official panels that control vaccine policy in the US (thereis one panel at the Centers for Disease Control and one at the FDA).Among the committees findings were widespread conflicts of interestamong panel members in the form of financial ties to pharmaceuticalcompanies who manufacture vaccines that the panels oversee. Followingis a summary of the committee findings, assembled by Dr Joseph Mercola(see www.mercola.com/2000/june/17/ vaccine_news.htm).
- The CDC routinely grants waivers from conflict of interest rules toevery member of its advisory committee.
- CDC advisory committee members who are not allowed to vote oncertain recommendations due to financial conflicts of interest areallowed to actively participate in committee deliberations andadvocate specific positions.
- The chairman of the CDC's advisory committee until recently owned600 shares of stock in Merck, a pharmaceutical company with an activevaccine division.
- Members of the CDC's advisory committee often leave key details outof their financial disclosure statements, and are not required toprovide the missing information by CDC ethics officials.
- Three out of the five FDA advisory committee members who voted toapprove the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties tothe pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versionsof the vaccine. The vaccine was recalled a few years later afternumerous public complaints of serious bowel obstruction due to thevaccine.
- Four out of the eight CDC advisory committee members who voted toapprove guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had similarfinancial ties.
In addition to conflicts of interest in advisory panels, there aresimilar concerns about lack of impartiality in vaccine research.Because of the scarcity of public funding for vaccine research, mostresearch is funded by the same companies which make the vaccines--andwhich are obviously hoping for optimistic results. Recently, tworesearchers, Professor David Elliman and Dr. Helen Bedford published astudy in the Lancet demonstrating the safety of themeasles-mumps-rubella (MMR) combined vaccine. The two came underpublic criticism when it was soon discovered that they had bothreceived money on a number of occasions from the vaccine manufacturer.Elliman is quoted, "If one were to cut off the money from thepharmaceutical industry we could all go home." (reported in Scotlandon Sunday by Camillo Fracassini, viewable atwww.whale.to/v/mmr698.html) Vaccine critics for their part can citeother studies which have pointed to links between the MMR shot and avariety of other conditions, especially autism and Crohn's disease ofthe bowel.
Researchers who persist in asking vaccine-related questions can seetheir funding dry up. Dr. John Martin, a pioneer investigator into thetransmission of stealth viruses from monkeys to humans, lost hisfunding when he continued to research the relationship of vaccines tosuch viral transmission. Other researchers have simply lost their jobs(see The Vaccine Guide, 2002 edition, p20, by Randall Neustaedter,OMD).
