World Health Organization Ensures More Children Die from Vaccines by Revising Vaccine Adverse Reaction Reporting

In April 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) coordinated a joint project between teams of experts from the National AEFI (adverse events following immunization) committees of India and Zimbabwe with each country’s Ministry of Health. However, doctors in private practice did not necessarily agree that the new guidelines helped protect the children of the world. In fact, they suspected just the opposite. Instead of accurately assessing potential vaccine-reactions, the new guidelines seemed to further hinder the discovery of real vaccine-reactions, particularly when a death occurred after vaccine administration. In a letter published in the prestigious Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, two prestigious doctors from India, Dr. Jacob Puliyel and Dr. Anant Phadke, expressed their concerns over this new classification system. “By simply denying deaths, the new AEFI classification is liable to miss the safety signals and therefore potential dangers with new vaccines.” They note that Sri Lanka suspended the use of a pentavalent vaccine after five deaths within four months after its introduction in January 2008 and, in 2013 Viet Nam shelved the pentavalent vaccine because it had been associated with 12 deaths. However, in both cases, the WHO teams which investigated the deaths declared they were ‘unlikely’ to be related to the vaccines used. The authors point out that the consequences of using the new classification are illustrated starkly in the causality assessment of 134 serious AEFI cases uploaded on the website of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in India. 78 of these babies survived and 58 died. Who is WHO protecting – children or vaccine manufacturers?