WHO Denies Link Between Swine Flu Vaccine and Illnesses, Deaths

WHO Denies Link Between Swine Flu Vaccine and Illnesses, Deaths
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
December 12 2009 | 6,828 views


The World Health Organization said on Thursday the H1N1 vaccine had been cleared of blame for 41 deaths which health authorities worldwide had investigated after suspicions they might have been caused by the inoculation.

"Although some investigations are still ongoing, the results of the completed investigations reported to WHO have ruled out that the pandemic vaccine is the cause of death," said Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO's top vaccine expert.

Authorities in China have reported two deaths following inoculation and 15 cases of severe side effects, the WHO said in a statement. "Thorough investigation of these deaths, including a review of autopsy results, determined that underlying medical conditions were the cause of death and not the vaccine," it said of China.

Fewer than a dozen suspected cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome had been reported following pandemic vaccination, she said. "Only a few of these Guillain-Barre may be linked to the pandemic vaccine .... and patients have recovered," she added.


Sources:

Reuters November 19, 2009






Dr. Mercola's Comments:



This would be great news were it not for the fact that reports of adverse reactions to this vaccine continue to pour in from around the world. Consider for example:

•In Canada, GlaxoSmithKline recalled an entire batch of its H1N1 vaccine, Arepanrix, after an unusual number of anaphylactic and other allergic reactions were reported.

•In the U.S., authorities are investigating dozens of reports of side effects across the country. For example, one victim is a New York City six-year-old who was vaccinated without her parents’ knowledge, and ended up in the hospital afterward; several others are high school students in Mississippi who went to the hospital with allergy-like symptoms immediately following their injections; and a Virginia 14-year-old was diagnosed with Guillian-Barre Syndrome shortly after his shot.

And these are just a sampling of what legitimate, mainstream news agencies have been reporting, while the WHO insists that safety is not a problem with this vaccine.

When you also take into consideration the blogs that are proliferating with complaints of side effects – such as miscarriages – (be aware: health officials don’t count blogs as legitimate) the WHO’s denials really don’t make sense.

I, for one, am truly curious about what kinds of “investigations” have been done, and how they’ve been able to completely rule out the vaccine as a potential cause of all those side effects and deaths.

I find it very interesting that if someone exhibits flu like symptoms and then dies, they officially died from the swine flu, even though the CDC no longer requires lab testing to verify infection.

And when someone dies shortly after receiving the flu shot, they died from some underlying cause that would have crippled or killed them anyway, no matter how young or healthy they were prior to the shot!

This kind of unscientific, illogical nonsense is downright infuriating.

Something is happening with these vaccines. But apparently, the WHO is choosing to stick its head in the sand when it comes to acknowledging any serious side effects. Instead, it continues to push the vaccines for a pandemic that not only turned out to be a blip on the radar, but now appears to have peaked and is on the downslide.

It’s Time to Investigate These Reports

It’s frustrating that health officials who call the shots, literally and figuratively, won’t address the professional and ethical thing to do here, which is to thoroughly investigate every single adverse report, especially the “unofficial” miscarriages.

Go to any of these websites, such as this one from Canada, and you will see that the reason the blogs are popping up is because no one seems to be collecting miscarriage data, mainly because doctors appear to be discounting the unfortunate events as having nothing to do with the vaccine. But why should these blogs be necessary? Isn’t it time for the WHO to demand that all miscarriages after an H1N1 vaccine be reported?

What’s frightening is that, instead of looking more closely at the adverse reactions, the WHO is criticizing the U.S. for refusing to use dangerous adjuvants such as squalene in its H1N1 vaccines!

In this report from Reuters, vaccine makers and the WHO are quoted from a Congressional hearing where WHO officials took the Centers for Disease Control – and Congress – to task for their cautiousness.

Adjuvants can double or triple the number of vaccines that can be created with a small amount of antigen. And since the WHO was hoping that rich countries would donate leftover vaccines, the fact that the U.S. isn’t using adjuvants – and therefore won’t have as many leftover vaccines – has the WHO upset.

It also has upset vaccine makers, who could have tripled their profits on an adjuvanted vaccine. Congress is still out on this issue. However, the whining and moaning did produce a reaction from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which decided to award researchers and companies $60 million to develop new adjuvants for use in the U.S.

Will they be any safer than the ones already created? I highly doubt it. Instead, we’ll probably see even more vaccines with highly questionable novel adjuvants that will not have been thoroughly tested prior to marketing.

Americans Turning Their Backs on the Shots

As it is, having leftover vaccines to donate to the WHO might not be a problem in the U.S. As reported on Fox News as well as in numerous mainstream media, interest in this shot is waning so much that some state and county health departments in the U.S. are offering the vaccine to just about anybody who will take it.

Two counties in northeast Indiana, for example, have so much H1N1 vaccine left over that they are lifting all restrictions on who gets it. The demand just isn’t there, even at doctors’ offices, Indiana health officials told the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

Similar reports are coming from the rest of the nation too. In Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported December 1 that the Davis County Health Department had 9,000 doses of shots or nasal spray available, but only 1,500 residents had picked up reservation tickets for them.

The same is true from south Florida to Oklahoma to Montana, where demand for the vaccine is so low that Ravalli County, Montana, health officials decided to take the shots on the road in a rolling vaccine clinic in an effort to get rid of their leftovers.

Ravalli County had planned to administer 2,000 shots a day at two recent Saturday clinics, according to the Ravelli Republic.They even had lined up an army of volunteers to help with the crowds expected at the clinics. But after all the preparation and blitzing, the only thing they had to show for it was a cloud of dust, with just 700 doses being administered over both all-day clinics.

Time to Admit the Blip

There still are some areas where health officials have managed to keep up the demand for the vaccine, mostly by selling the idea that another wave of H1N1 might be on its way. But the point is, this pandemic has proven to be a disappointing blip on the radar, with far fewer people being stricken by this flu than was predicted.

The latest news from Quest Diagnostics Health Trends, which tracks laboratory testing services for emerging diseases, confirms that H1N1 peaked in October.

So why not admit this flu for the non-event that it is? The H1N1 “pandemic” has proven to be nothing but a practice drill to see how fast nations and health officials respond when WHO calls a war.

The only problem with that is, what happens if, like in the story of “The Little Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’” nobody pays attention when a real pandemic develops? In the meantime, let’s start taking all adverse reaction reports on this vaccine seriously, instead of denying that they are related.




Related Links:

Latest H1N1 Swine Flu Alerts


Do Vaccine Companies Secretly Favor a World Flu Pandemic?


Superstar CBS Reporter Blows the Lid Off the Swine Flu Media Hype and Hysteria

Big Pharma May be Handed Blanket Immunity for All Drug Side Effects, Deaths

Big Pharma May be Handed Blanket Immunity for All Drug Side Effects, Deaths
Monday, November 03, 2008 by: David Gutierrez
Key concepts: The FDA, Estrogen and Side effects




(NaturalNews) The Supreme Court may rule that pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued for dangerous or even deadly side effects from their drugs if those side effects arise from an FDA-approved use.

Under a legal argument known as "pre-emption," the FDA's approval of a drug absolves companies of any responsibility if that drug later turns out to be dangerous, even if information was concealed from the FDA during the approval process. While courts have rejected this argument for decades, the winds appear to be shifting.

In February, the Supreme Court ruled that makers of medical devices were indeed immune from state lawsuits if their devices had received FDA approval. But that decision hinged on the specific wording of the law that gives the FDA authority over medical devices, and the laws relating to drug regulation are not worded the same way.

Even so, the Bush administration has been actively urging the courts to apply the same principle to drugs. The administration argues that only the FDA is equipped to regulate drugs and decide whether a product is safe, and that judges or juries are not able to make informed decisions on those matters.

The FDA has also recently thrown its support behind pre-emption, reversing a longstanding, de-facto policy of viewing lawsuits as an extra layer of oversight to make up for the agency's time and budget constraints. Now the agency says that lawsuits over drug side effects could lead to a confusing state-by-state regulatory patchwork that would cause hardship to drug companies and discourage patients from taking certain medications.

Drug companies are using the pre-emption argument as a legal defense in a wide variety of lawsuits, and the Supreme Court is expected to hear such a case, concerning the company Wyeth, in the fall. Before that, however, a lower federal court is expected to rule on whether pre-emption can be used to dismiss lawsuits by more than 3,000 women who claim that they were injured by using Johnson & Johnson's OrthoEvra birth control patch according to the instructions on the label.

When Johnson & Johnson announced its plans for a birth control patch in 1996, one of the main benefits it claimed the product would provide was the ability to prevent pregnancies through lower doses of estrogen than birth control pills. High doses of estrogen are known to increase women's risks of blood clots, heart attacks, strokes and death.

But company documents publicized as part of the lawsuits show that in 1999, the company discovered that the patch actually exposed women to significantly more estrogen than the pill, a total of 30 to 38 micrograms per day. Because only about half of the estrogen in a birth control pill actually enters the bloodstream, this means that women using the patch were getting as much estrogen each day as if they were taking a 76 microgram birth control pill.

The FDA banned birth control pills containing more than 50 micrograms of estrogen in 1988.

Rather than reporting this data to the FDA, however, the study's author instead applied a "correction factor," reducing the estrogen figures by 40 percent. Although the author claimed this was meant to adjust for differing rates of estrogen absorption, such a "correction" was a deviation from the study procedure previously submitted to the FDA.

In the final report submitted to the FDA, Johnson & Johnson claimed that OrthoEvra exposed women to only 20 micrograms of estrogen per day. The "correction factor" was referenced only once in the 435-page study report, buried in a complex mathematical formula.

According to internal company emails, other clinical trials conducted before approval suggested that women were experiencing side effects such as breast soreness and nausea due to high estrogen doses, but the company did not warn the FDA that the patch might be delivering more estrogen than advertised. Nor did it tell the agency about other studies, in 1999 and 2003, showing that the patch exposed women to more estrogen than the pill.

When the FDA approved the product in 2001, Johnson & Johnson marketed it as releasing less estrogen than the pill, containing 20 micrograms per day.

The label was not revised until a 2005 investigation by the FDA, following reports of deaths resulting from use of the drug. At that point, the FDA made Johnson & Johnson add a warning that the product "exposes women to higher levels of estrogen than most birth control pills."

But the company always knew this to be the case, several lawsuits now allege, and is thus responsible for the side effects that resulted: heart attacks, strokes, and even deaths in those who used the patch as directed. Studies have since confirmed that women on the patch may have twice the blood clot risk of women taking birth control pills, and prescriptions have fallen 80 percent, from a high of 900,000 in March 2004 to only 187,000 in February 2007.

But Johnson & Johnson claims that because the FDA approved the drug, the company cannot be held responsible for its effects.

Janet Abaray, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, disagrees, saying the company took advantage of the agency's shortcomings.

"Johnson & Johnson knew that FDA. does not have the funding or the manpower to police drug companies," Abaray said.

David Vladeck of Georgetown Law School agrees that the FDA has no ability to verify that drug companies are being truthful in their reports.

"These are scientists, not cops," he said.

Chris Seeger, another plaintiffs' lawyer, said it would be a mistake to allow pre-emption to let the drug companies off the hook.

"Our lawsuits are the ultimate check against the mistake made by the government, or fraud made by the companies against the government, or just an underfunded bureaucracy stretched thin," he said.

Sources for this story include: www.nytimes.com.